Smarter Waiting: Understanding and Enhancing Children's Queue Experience in Digital Chats with AI-Powered Storytelling

With the growing use of digital platforms for professional chat support, waiting time has become a major source of frustration, especially in digital mental health services for children, where many leave the queue before receiving help. This paper explores how an AI-powered interactive feature can improve children’s queue experience by identifying key design and functional requirements and evaluating its impact on engagement, boredom, and perceived waiting time. Through a Design Thinking process, two iterations were conducted: a low-fidelity prototype co-designed with children and experts, and a high-fidelity prototype featuring an LLM-based storytelling agent. The findings underscore the importance of safety, transparency, emotional expression, and personalization in child-AI interactions, showing that storytelling agents can reduce boredom and enhance engagement while children wait.