HEEBEE
Created a platform that limits the screen time habits of children and helps the parents to manage the time spent on the device.
WHAT IS HEEBEE?
In the world of technology, everyone is moving in a fast-paced environment towards the various scope of developments. On the other hand, kids who are 4years & above are easily carried away by devices (mobile, tablet, or desktop).
Our client noticed at his family gatherings most of the time his nephew and niece were busy with devices rather than spending family quality time. Observing this situation, his idea was to create an application that provides a healthy screen time habit for kids where parents can be relaxed and does not feel guilty or burdened even if they are exceeding their screen time a little more.
My contribution
• Gathered client requirements to understand the unique selling point of the product.
• Researched and drafted a survey questionnaire based on the discussion with the team and client.
• In the research phase, I was able to find the iOS third-party constraint which helped the team to alert and find a solution beforehand.
• Performed ten usability tests with the users which helped to improve the user flow
• Collaborated with the project team and stakeholders to define and implement innovative solutions for the product’s user experience.
Goals
User
Give parents peace of mind when their child is using a mobile device. Build an app that is simple to install and use.
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Business
Partnership opportunities with content producers. Eventual monetization and/or sale.
Research
After the client meeting, I wanted to know the definition of “screen time” to start with research.
We divided the research phase into categories, including general findings, screen time concerns, surveys and user interviews, and comparative competitive analysis
General findings
• Screen time consumption for kids is currently more than 3+ hours per day, whereas there are varying recommendations for daily screen time by the World Health Organization- guidelines; depending on the child’s age are:
• For kids over 5 years old, the recommendation is for 2 hours of recreational screen time a day and one hour of exercise and 9 to 11 hours of sleep.
• Unfortunately, its sad to know that only 5% of kids are meeting this guideline-recommended by WHO and the remaining percentage of kids are not following.
Screen time concerns
While researching more about screen time, we came across different screen time concerns around kids. kid’s family are also being hampered by the daily routine that creates a negative impact.
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• Mental health
There are various mental health issues for kids who use excessive screen time. For example; less sleep and bad eating habits.
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• Physical health
Affects kids’ physical factors like headaches, vision syndrome, ergonomics, and bad sitting postures.
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• Social aspect
Unstable psychological factors and anti-social behaviours of kids.
Survey and user interview
Sent a survey and interviewed some user’s around the Vancouver region to understand human behaviour and thoughts around the screen time app.
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• Survey
The survey results showed that people were more interested in features that limit the use of devices and secondly to provide education and balance kids anti-social behaviour.
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• User interview
However, from the user interview, I got to know that users are much more interested in mindfulness activities, physical and secondary education content.
Surprisingly, parents know that there are existing apps in the market and are concerned about their children's screen time, but they are not using such apps for their child.
In the competitive analysis, I understood the pain point of why the audience is not inclined to install and use such apps. Onboarding parental control apps were too complex to handle and also it only restricts the screen time duration and does not enforce it positively which results in an argument between parent and child.
Affects kids’ physical factors like headaches, vision syndrome, ergonomics, and bad sitting postures.
Comparative competitive analysis
Analyzed various existing screen time apps to understand the essence of what they have already created and what could be done differently to create a positive impact on our users.
Most of the apps were to allow parents to block content (games or adult videos), keep track of history and device usage stats, and manage schedules and location tracking features.
Also in our competitive analysis, we tried to find the existing and different features on IOS and Android screen time apps.
• Google and Apple recently implemented Screen Time functionality and enhanced parental controls.
• Screen Time is built into iOS ' Family Link, a downloadable app that exists in the market.
Constraints
Felt that this is the end of our research phase and we can move to our planning phase and be ready to build an iOS app for the client. However, the information made me stuck and realized that the screen time app has a huge restriction and can not be built on the iOS Platform.
Uncovering is a statement released by Apple in April 2019 acknowledging that they pulled several screen-time-like apps from the App Store. Citing the fact that they were using a technology called Mobile Device Management or “MDM,” which is used by companies to access, monitor, and control employee devices — A significant privacy concern.
Hence, observed that is the actual reason there were fewer third party players in the market space. I felt that this is just the end of the world & sadly can not build the UX project for the client.
Fortunately, in discussion with the client and engineers, found a solution out of that hurdle. A team of engineering friends suggested that it is possible to create an app on Android. Thankfully, came across Apple's restriction article earlier. The Android friend proved more accommodating.
The facts about parent control apps are that “Parents shouldn’t have to trade their fears of their children’s device usage for risks to privacy and security, and the App Store should not be a platform to force this choice.”
Solution
Planning
In the planning phase, I was ready to sort the cards and flesh out the actual data which would help to create a persona, journey map, storyboarding and user flow.
User persona
Meet Our Personas, it consists of two users Tanya and Josh (mother and kid) both parties role is equally important so didn’t create a separate persona as I wanted to keep it easy and direct.
Storyboarding
Feature prioritization
After creating the user persona, now was the time to sort the researched data finding into important features to be installed in the screen time app. I wrote down some features based on the research which were important and urgent to keep then categorized the sticky notes on the wall.
As you can see below in the images, features were sorted based on nice to have, must-have, and don't want categories and also in four name tags for important/not important and urgent/not urgent categories.
Site map and user flow
• Site map
After feature prioritization with an understanding of what to keep and whatnot, I started to create a site map. The site map was essential as there were two users for an app but the challenge was to keep it simple and intuitive. As you can see in the image below, there is a legend box that displays the name of the rectangular boxes on the map. As discussed above, the onboarding flow is the toughest part that has to be set by the parents, and then they can hand over the phone to their respective children after setting the onboarding flow.
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• User flow
Once the child has the device and the content has already been set up by the parent’s, the child can only access it as per their parent’s selection. After the time is over they will get the selected activity whether it's mindfulness, physical, or educational depending on the child’s age. This loop repeats a couple of times and the child will get a reminder to quit for 5 and 1minutes. The app will get locked and the PIN code will be requested by the app that has been set up by the parents in the onboarding process. Then kids need to hand over or ask and take parent’s permission to unlock the device.
Design
In the design phase, starting with the paper prototype design to check whether the design makes sense and can be processed the user testing. After designing a low fidelity prototype, I check the user flow to assure that if important features are missing or not. Later, slight changes were made based on the user's feedback.
Iterations
Onboarding
In the image below, the onboarding flow has been changed several times. The aim was to create clarity and ease of boarding that efficiently communicates what Heebee does and how to set it up. Based on the user's feedback from testing, I changed this to a guided onboarding to walk the user through configuring the settings that became easy, simple, and intuitive for users to test.
Dashboard
The following are improvements being done to make the dashboard flow.
• Improved the feature by allowing new activity for each child's screen time session.
• Activity rotation displayed several options that allow the room for additional content later on.
• Adding a notification beforehand helped parents to understand actions.
• The goal was to create a "set and forget" type of interface that parents can easily manage in their daily-busy schedule.
Mid fidelity wireframes
Below are some mid-fi sample images which show how a parent can set up a child’s profile and handover device for their kids. Screen time enforces the positive and learning content of the child and once the screen time is over the child has to return the device as it’ll ask for the PIN that had been set by the parents.
Final design
Future consideration
• Social component
• Delay app opening
• Kid avatars
• Parent code invitation
• Schedule time
Conclusion
This was an interesting project for us because of its complex nature and challenges we faced while building an app for our client.
• The major challenge was to create a simple and easy app to use on the device.
• Build an app from scratch with zero content for it.
• During the research, I found that other apps were overly complex.
• Third-party app restrictions on iOS platforms
• In the build phase there were challenges due to the complex nature of how the app worked.
• Required multiple user interactions, system-level, and security access
• Numerous rounds of testing identified small tweaks that had to be made in different what-if scenarios.
I would like to thank my stakeholder, who came up with this idea and challenged me to create it and was supportive throughout the project.
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