Student safety has always been one of the biggest concerns in US society. Besides physical harmness, along with technology improvements, less-visible threats online have been rising, such as violent, pornographic, or other inappropriate information. It is getting grim, as a growing number of school districts offer laptops, iPad, Chromebooks or other devices for students to use in the classroom or at home. It is essential to keep an eye on students’ online activities so that school administrators and parents can identify potential threats or safety concerns early.
Illustration credit Ivan Jarvis
Why Securly
Nowadays, in the US, over 10,000+ schools have deployed online safety appliances a.k.a “Securly School” served by Securly Inc to monitor and filter students behaviors from any devices on their network. Instead of expensive devices, Securly School is supported by cloud-based services, for example, detect content on devices and block it, scan email, doc and drive for nudity, cyber-bullying and self-harm, etc. By leveraging these features, school administrators can monitor students’ use of school devices including internet usage while on the school network. Controlling the Wi-Fi connection of students’ school devices is also feasible. What if students use devices out of school network, for example, at home after school. Can parents play as school administrators to monitor children’s activities online in real time ? This critical problem was what my team and I figured out.
Terminologies referred in Home App
Who are the target users?
Securly Parents and Hub Parents are typically two target users of this Securly Home app. Securly parents can monitor school devices via Securly Home App with grants from school. Hub parents can use Securly App to manage personal devices via Securly Hub connecting to the router at home.
Insight from Home App and device management
In order to find the problem, I talked with the support team to see all feedback from the users and interviewed 5 participants who never used this app before. My goals was to understand the challenges Secruly Parents and Hub Parents faced.
Design Strategy
Vision
To provide a flawless experience for parents who use Home App to enable children’s internet safety at home. To complete the product line of Securly for dominating market share of network safety solution providers, filling the gap that parents can not monitor and/or manage personal devices at home.
Business mode
We considered leveraging existing cloud-based services of “Securly School” to manage the school devices on the home network because school devices have already deployed MDM setup. We particularly designed a mobile app “Securly Home App” as a portal for parents to view and manage children’s behaviors on school devices that are connected to home Wi-Fi. This free service extension on school devices provides parents a good user experience of how effectively protecting children online. The parents gaining benefits from this “free-trial” service would likely pay for an advanced device “Premium Hub” deployed to the home router for managing all private devices in the same manners. Considering the base number of schools and parents that have been using “Securly School” and “Securly Home App” as well as the good feedbacks of user’s experience, we believe “Premium Hub” could be easily accepted and rapidly take the market share.
Matrix for evaluating success
User Journey
Workflow of Kid's Profile
Create a kid's profile
View, Edit and delete a profile
Avatar credit Edna Constantino
User Testing
Based on all the problems that we found in the first round user testing, I reconsidered details and implemented details in a high prototype like this:
Avatar credit Edna Constantino
Roadmap
To provide a flawless experience for parents who use Home App to enable children’s internet safety at home. To complete the product line of Securly for dominating market share of network safety solution providers, filling the gap that parents can not monitor and/or manage personal devices at home.
Manage Devices
As we redesigned the workflow based on a profile oriented model, we grouped the functionality of device management by profiles instead of listing all devices in a single panel. By this design, a device must be either assigned to a profile (manageable, a.k.a. “filtered”) or not assigned (not manageable, a.k.a “unfiltered”). New added devices were sticked on top with new tags in the unfiltered device list. Parents could also assign unfiltered devices to any profile to enable management. In the managed device panel, the parents had a clear view that a kid has all devices associated with him/her, and could easily control these devices. For example, assign a device to another profile. In a real case, the elder brother transferred an iPad to his little brother who had an individual profile with different rules applied. Remove a device from profile, just like people didn’t want to care about an old cell phone that was not using.
Set up Rules
Activity Feed with Kid's Profile
User Testing Result
Final UI Mockup
After launch...
