LEAD • PRODUCT DESIGN • COPY • RESEARCH • CLIENT
Verizon Smart Family
Verizon Smart Family gives parents tools to assist them in the job of parenting. Parents can locate their kids anytime, limit device use and block inappropriate apps and websites.
OVERVIEW
Our company was on an unsustainable trajectory supporting two aging platforms for our carrier partners (Verizon & AT&T) – one that offered parental controls and one that let parents locate their family members. Each platform had valuable features, but they were stagnant, difficult to update, and faced growing competition. I led a three-person design team and facilitated a 45-person cross functional team tasked with reimagining our platform for our 2 million paying customers. Our simple but powerful design built on top of our solid feature set won over Verizon and put our company back on a solid technical and financial path.
DESIGN OBJECTIVE
Build the parental controls app for every family
BUSINESS GOALS
Win over our carrier partners with a compelling product vision
Grow the user base by providing new value
Improve user retention & LTV
USER RESEARCH
Keep kids safe physically & digitally
Help kids grow into successful adults
This means achieving the right balance between teaching them to become responsible and self-sufficient and maintaining the appropriate level of oversight and control.
Help adults feel like they’re being good parents
We found that more than ever the pressure and visibility of how other parents around them are parenting plays a key role in determining how they want to feel and be seen as a parent.
Control and monitor what matters most
Screen time (how much), content (what & when), & location (where).
Key Finding
Each family's needs depend on their personal values & the age of their children
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Evolve with the family
Families aren’t static - solutions can’t be either. Parenting techniques evolve as children grow up - time spent together, awareness, and ownership change. Using the Avast Mobile Intelligence lab, glean insights and help the app adapt to the families needs year after year.
Deliver proactive value
Parents are busy - we do the work for them and inform them only when there is something important to tell them. We want to push insights, not data (which is common in other apps).
Be action oriented
Keep parents engaged and allow them to take action when issues come up so they know they are being good parents.
Require minimal behavior change
We want to fit into the natural flow of what parents are already doing. The behavior of the parent trains our app, not the other way around.
KEY INTERACTIONS
Building UI for active and passive engagement
Providing parents peace of mind as well as actionable insights
STATUS
Child status is shown in the most valuable real estate at the top of the screen. This dynamic information offers value every time a parent comes to 'snack' on the app. It answers many parents’ most pressing questions: "What's up with my kid? Where are they? Why aren’t they picking up their phone?" It also allows parents to take immediate action by pausing their child’s internet.
HIGHLIGHTS
Highlights also allow for “snacking” behavior by providing insights about a child’s usage gleaned from our machine learning algorithms. New cards are dynamically shown every few times a parent comes into the app. Cards inform parents about their child’s usage and also serve as a form of passive onboarding to tell them about features in the app.
CONTROLS
Controls give parents peace of mind by ensuring that children are protected and parents are informed about important activity. Controls offer "set it and trust it" functionality and so are at the bottom of the screen, out of the way from the more dynamic content. We use smart onboarding techniques to help users quickly set up and personalize these controls.
BRANDING AND COMPONENT SYSTEM
FEATURED
