Research and design behind the parent experience for ZOTT

Getting started

Competitive research

I examined YouTube Kids and Amazon FreeTime, and a team member analyzed Netflix and Nintendo Switch, as part of a competitive analysis of similar platforms with content control features. We found features that could serve as generative ideas for ZOTT’s parent-users, such as parental controls, monitoring capabilities, conversation starters, and interactions around pre-emptive and reactionary blocking of content. 

We hit our first obstacle while preparing a usability test for evaluating the CMS side of the platform. We wanted to see how the current experience was serving the staff who were responsible, on top of their professional healthcare roles, for curating the content available for patients in their hospital. It proved almost impossible to obtain access to this small and very busy pool of child life staff, pediatric patients, and their families from ZOTT’s nine pilot hospitals. 

While we were deciding on a new approach to gathering data on the CMS side of the product, I moved forward with the parent focus. I created a screener, recruited participants, and scheduled four parents of children who had recently spent 24 hours hospitalized (at any hospital) to learn more about their general device usage and how devices were used during the hospital stay. In my hour-long interviews with each of them, I found:

• Parents' rules and norms regarding their children's device usage were thrown out the window while in the hospital.

• All parents were interested in their children's digital safety, especially from unwanted contact or conversations, and in monitoring device usage to some degree.

From the three staff members that our team was eventually able to interview about the CMS, we found that the design of the CMS was not an issue.

• ZOTT was underused by patients or staff because the staff didn't always have the time to introduce patients to the platform or use the CMS to put content on the platform for access.

• Staff also reported that if a parent is interested in ZOTT, the platform gets more used by the child. 

Project pivot: Parent onboarding

I advocated for our team and convinced our stakeholders to shift our project focus towards the parent experience due to these findings and constraints. We anticipated that this would relieve the burden of introduction from the staff and we could increase platform engagement by turning parents into advocates. ZOTT agreed that this new direction was valid and supported our shift in direction towards developing an onboarding experience and features for parents.

Research round two

To learn the best practices for designing digital device experiences for families, I performed a literature review around joint media engagement and emerging understandings about productive usage. I also interviewed the VP of Product at GoNoodle, a children’s entertainment platform promoting health, and talked with leading researchers in game design and children from UCI such as Dr. Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist whose research focused on children and youth's relationships to media.

At this point, I knew what competitors were doing and we knew what academic research suggested, but I didn't have a clear idea of what ZOTT’s user-parents would actually appreciate. To get this feedback, I helped to craft a survey for parents of children who use digital devices to prioritize the suggestions we had gathered from the other sources. The survey responses prioritized our ideas and we were able to move into the design phase.

Design

Onboarding experience

The team’s designers developed a user flow of the new onboarding experience for parents. I contributed to early ideas with paper sketches and copy iterations before other team members moved into wireframes.

The wireframes for onboarding and a parent dashboard were converted to an interactive prototype. I user-tested the prototype with friends and family to get early feedback and identified issues with a flagging feature and dashboard structure. We crafted a testing protocol for another prototype, this one using the high fidelity designs, to get additional feedback from remote moderated usability tests with six parents of children ages 2-18 using UserTesting.

Testing

Usability results

Based on the second round of usability tests, we clarified the cost, improved the findability of the flagging icon, simplified the hand-over from a parent to a child and framed content blocking as a positive experience.

Impact

• Users gave our final prototype of the onboarding flow and parent dashboard a System Usability Score (SUS) in the 90th percentile, meaning there were nearly no usability issues.

• The VP of Product was excited about our work, particularly the parts about pricing and how that concern reflected the user's emotional state in the hospital, which shifted product roadmap directions.

“For a first-time user I feel like I’m a returning user, and that can only mean brownie points.”

— Participant in the usability test of the new parent portal design