Anew Kids
Project Duration: Mar’ 2024 - Oct’ 2024
Area
Methods
Client
Team
My Role
User Research, Customer Discovery, Prototyping,
UX Design, Business Case Development, Pricing
Project Overview
I led the product development of Anew Anew Kids is designed to offer a holistic parental control solution that benefits both parents and children. The research revealed that most existing parental control apps focus solely on setting boundaries for children but fail to address the behavioral change in children. Anew Kids is designed to bring a behavioral change in children
Why?
- Working parents often struggle to monitor and regulate their children’s smartphone usage due to their busy schedules.
- Excessive screen time disrupts discipline and adversely affects children’s overall development, including their social and cognitive growth.
- Children and teenagers are unaware of potential online threats, especially on social media and gaming platforms.
What?
How?
Limit screen time and set daily digital usage.
- Blocking age-inappropriate websites, apps, and content to protect children from online risks.
- Foster long term behavioral change by designing the solution based on 4 behavioral change principles- Positive Reinforcement, Positive Punishment, Negative Punishment and Negative Reinforcement.
- Personalized recommendation to parents based on their kids’ digital usage
Goals
User Goals
Unregulated smart phone use significantly impacts kids’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being. The research aimed to understand the challenges parents and children face and develop a solution that encourages responsible smartphone usage habits.
How might we instill healthy digital consumption habits in children so that they remain safe, grow healthy and smart?
Business Impact
- Expand Market Reach: Broaden Anew customer base by capturing the adolescent segment aged 13-18
- Enhance Product Offerings: Develop new solutions tailored for adolescents
- Build Sustainable Revenue Streams: Conducted pricing analysis for the product to determine appropriate pricing strategy for the product
Research Approach
Secondary Research: I analyzed various and experiments which proved how un-regulated smartphone use hinder children’s physical, mental and emotional development. This analysis validated our assumptions and paved the way for future research with participants. I also investigated articles and books on children’s psychology and behavior change to build deep understanding on how behavioral change principles could be applied to make a sustainable change in children’s behavior.
Surveys: Given limited resources, participant recruitment posed a challenge. I distributed surveys in online parent groups to understand the demographics, parental concerns, and identify parents who viewed smartphone addiction as a critical issue. Contrary to initial assumptions, parents of young children (3-8 yrs) were not the primary audience; instead, parents transitioning their children to their first smartphones showed more interest.
Interviews: Surveys helped me recruit the volunteering parents who find it challenging to discipline their children lifestyle and are concerned by adverse effect of digital devices overuse. I conducted 15+ semi-structured interviews with parents to understand their day-to-day experience with children.
Usability Testing: Drawing from interview insights, I created app prototypes and tested them with parents to understand their initial responses. Conducted usability to test the initial prototypes and refine designs based on user feedback.
Key Insights
Research highlighted concerns of parents such as difficulty enforcing screen time rules and the need for tools to safeguard their children online. Parents expressed a desire for solutions that promotes discipline and responsible behavior, rather than merely restricting the digital access.
Monitoring Challenges
Working parents often lack time to supervise their children’s digital activities.
“I am a single mother and I work for long hours. It is not easy for me to monitor my daughter when I am away from home.”
Multiple Devices
The availability of multiple devices makes it harder for parents to enforce consistent rules.
“I blocked access to YouTube on the computer, now my son tries to open YouTube on TV when I am away”
Behavioral Development
Parents aim for kids to learn healthy habits and screen use early.
“I aim to instill healthy habits early on, as it’s much harder to influence behavior and build healthier routines once children reach their teenage years.”
Target Customers
Working mothers of children 12-13 years old children, who are transitioning to their first smartphones are more likely to adopt parental control solutions.
Recommendations
The research findings support the following recommendations on the solutions:
Must-Have Features
- The solution must be compatible across devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets).
- It must have a feature to block inappropriate content and apps to safeguard children.
Should-Have Features
- Should be able to provide personalized recommendation based on child’s age
& phone usage - Should recommend developmentally appropriate content and usage limits.
- Should provide insights into kid’s compliance to the rules to quantify the performance.
Could-Have Features
- Tools to flag concerning usage patterns or behaviors for parental review in real-time
Behavioral change in adolescents
I aimed to instill lasting, sustainable behavior change, encouraging long-term healthy smartphone usage. To support this goal, I explored how behavioral design principles could be thoughtfully integrated into the solution. Behavioral change can be achieved through small, intentional design choices that shape habits, guide decision-making, and reduce friction for desired actions. There are four ways through which one could achieve behavioral change –
Positive Reinforcement: Adding a pleasant stimulus to encourage a behavior.
Negative Reinforcement: The removal of an aversive stimulus to increase or encourage a desired behavior.
Positive Punishment: Adding an unpleasant stimulus to decrease or stop a behavior.
Negative Punishment: Taking away a pleasant stimulus to decrease or stop an unwanted behavior.
I leveraging these principles and research on children psychology I suggested following features for the Anew Kids. I presented various ideas to enable behavioral change in teens through Anew Kids to the leadership. We used Impact vs Effort matrix to select the most suitable features bolded bellow for the minimum viable product and first round of usability testing. I created a road map to incorporate remaining features informed by behavioral design in the app.
Usability Testing
I created MVP prototypes and tested them with users with users in the moderated usability testing sessions.
- Initial Assumption– Parents would appreciate educational tips on managing teens.
- Findings– Busy parents preferred concise, actionable insights over lengthy posts.
- Design Iterations– Early designs for flexible screen time limits were confusing, prompting a redesign with clearer buttons and copy.
- Visual Reports– Parents appreciated summary reports with visual data on screen time and app usage. These helped parents explain the impact of smartphone habits to their children effectively.
I modified the product prototypes based on usability tests suggestions.
Challenges & Next Steps
One of the primary challenges was recruiting children for the study. Given the project’s early stage and constraints such as legal and time limitations, we decided to focus on gauging parents’ perceptions to design the first version of the app. In the next phase, I plan to conduct more in-depth research directly with adolescents to refine the solution further.
Another significant challenge was determining the market entry strategy. The parental control market is highly saturated with apps that primarily limit screen time and block harmful content. However, these solutions often overlook the importance of promoting behavioral change and providing educational resources for parents. I positioned Anew Kids as a solution rooted in behavioral change principles rather than simply enforcing restrictions. It addresses this critical gap by empowering parents to foster responsible habits in their children while ensuring online safety. For the initial product testing, a focus on behavioral change is strongly recommended.
By combining practical controls with tools for long-term habit formation, Anew Kids aims to promote balanced and safe smartphone usage, contributing to the holistic development of children in an increasingly digital world.