Securly Home is an app for parents to manage children’s online activities at home.
The Team
Product Manager
It's me!
Product Designer
Engineers
Illustrator
In the old version of Home design, all devices had to be applied by one rule. The difficulty of granular management of children was rising when parents had many children and each child had more than one device.
Old design
Project Goal
The goal is to provide a better way to manage multiple family members and multiple devices in a home network.
Research
More than one child
From survey and interview data, we noticed that over 60% of families have more than one child, and on average more than three devices (including laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.) need to be managed. Parents felt it was hard to track every single child’s online activity on these devices. In addition, due to the variety of children’s age, interests, and web pages wanted to be browsed, it is impossible to set different permissions for different children on "Securly Home".
How might we
Build the one-to-many mapping of children and devices based on the multiple rules setting
Design Principle
How to define success
Manage each child separately
Parents could review each child's online activities and modify the rule associated with this child
Efficiency
Reduce redundant, unnecessary, and unrelating presenting information, focus on the most important ones for effective viewing.
Easy to create and edit
Facilitate the create operation and edit operation because some of the parents don’t have much experience of operating modern consumer electronics devices as the youth do. We should take these customers into consideration.
Plan 1
Rename devices
First, I attempted to tag a child’s name to a device, and then add this device into different rules. This solution is a sort of device-based management strategy.
It is easy to identify devices, adding a new device.
However, it is a tedious process to look up all activities by a child's name and not able to characteristically manage individual children. To the parents who most do search and view children’s online activities, it was not efficient.
Plan 2
Kid's Profile
It is a profile-based management strategy, which was to set a Profile of a child and create a rule associated with this child's profile. So any devices added to this child’s profile will be managed based on this.
Achieved the goal of managing each child separately. Effectively to view each child’s online activity.
Challenges
1
High Implementation Cost
Implement cost is big because all existing features and functions would be impacted and need additional effort to change accordingly.
Solution: Discuss all impacts and extend delivery timeline
Having had discussions with engineers and other stakeholders, we went for the kid's profile solution. We took much effort for design and development in the short term though, it was proven had saved more efforts after having redesigned the product architecture. By getting rid of the existing oversimplified heritage, the Kid's-Profile-based design easily onboarded the in planning features including “offline schedule”, “kid’s stories”, “location”, etc.
Planed timeline
Actual timeline
Challenges
2
Impact Existing Users' Experience
The workflow change would impact some existing users who might not fit in this change, which would be a risk of losing customers.
Solution: Provide a smooth transition for existing users
For helping users migrate to the new version smoothly, existing users were asked to create Kids Profile before proceeding.
Design a guidance page, illustrating why Kid’s Profile is needed and how to create one
Retain and migrate user’s existing customized data like rules, sites to save user’s manual efforts
Challenges
3
Potential use cases are not included
Some scenarios still not be covered: For example, which profile should a device sharing among many children be added to?
How to handle a temporary device? e.g. A visitor’s iPhone, which profile should it be added to?
How to pause only one device but keep the others normal on a child’s profile?
Solution
Determine the potential use cases had included everything into consideration as possible. We achieved this in two ways:
1) Initiate internal seminars with representatives from cross-functional teams.
2) Discover real corner cases via user interviews
Guest Profile
We found that most of the families have guest children visiting their homes. They might bring personal devices and connect home WiFi while staying. Parents definitely had to protect these children via Secruly Home App, but creating a single profile for every child is tedious, especially when many kids come for a home party. To solve this use case, we added a default profile: Guest Device. Users could unify manage all temporarily being used personal devices into this profile and flush off all of them at the end.
Shared Devices
A use case that happens in a family is kids sharing one device, for example, a computer or iPad. Accordingly, we created the second default profile: Shared Device. Any device assigned to this profile is not associated with any particular kid, so no need to bind with any age-based rules. Parents can control the shared devices in a fine granularity manner.
Review separate activities
Create a kid's profile
For helping users migrate to the new version smoothly, existing users were asked to create Kids Profile before proceeding.
Final Demo
Support Multiple Rules
After Launch in 30 days
Daily active users(DAU)
increased 156%
87.3% users successfully created kid's profile
12 month later
Home App has become a significant part of the company’s business strategy. We continued to have delivered and launched “online schedule”, “manage school device”, “weekly report” features following the roadmap of Kid’s Profile. I was pleased to see, Home App has been rated at 5.0 stars in Google Play since last week, and it has gradually grown from an experimental product to the company’s most important B2C product and revenue source.
