Target Audience – Parents who are concerned by their children’s smartphone use, or are considering purchasing a smartphone for their child.
Key feature:
Objective:
- Allow parents to monitor and control their kids phone time in a fun, collaborative, way.
- Create better relationships between children, their parents and their smart phones.
- Train children into acquire good screen habits, through behavioural change.
Techniques & Methods
1. Interviews and observations
2. Wireframing and prototyping in XD
Created wire frames and user tested. Then added friendly assets to aid the behavioural change with an easy flow to help parents with the set up and use of the app.
3. Animation Styles
Each phone alert has a different animation style to fit with the message type. For example, the bouncy fun “chat to your mates” is a gentle reminder at a early stage. The angry “Stop it” message comes at a later stage, simulates cracks in the screen and turns off your data stream!
4. User Testing
Engaged in the user testing phase with several groups of children. It was during this phase we realised that parents could do with using the app to control their own screen time. I thought that if children could partner with parents, this behavioural change could be achieved more easily. Thus, ‘The Nod’ became as a shared monitoring device between the parents and the children.
5. Post Testing Updates
Later iterations of the app now included an option to add more users and compare screen time, giving the extra bonus of gentle competition to improve everyone’s relationship with their screen.
6. User testing and video creation
Further testing concluded the new version with the gentle competition feature added is more acceptable to the families I tested with.
Sue Kenny 