Kids Online Safety
NYU Class Project, 2022
An Online Learning Journey
For this project, I collaborated with my team members to design and test a virtual program to help parents teach their children about online safety. We focused on creating an educational app to support parents as they help their kids safely navigate the online world.
The Problem
Many parents of children 6-10 years old need help managing their children’s online exposure. Despite the built-in security measures on websites and apps, they can still be exposed to content that parents consider inappropriate. Parents worry that their children will begin to mimic behaviors they learn from online sources that don’t align with their expectations or values. Based on my team’s user research, parents want to know more about how to manage their child’s online exposure to have confidence in their ability to address online safety. Using this data I joined the team to help them prototype and test an educational app to do just that.
Ideation & Prototyping
We decided on a guided learning journey that will provide parents with activities to engage their children in building online safety skills. The learning journey will incorporate different types of learning experiences, including but not limited to; videos; conversation starters; interactive storytelling; pretend play; practice scenarios; and more. Ultimately, the product will help parents engage with their children and work together to build online safety skills. After we discussed the key visual design principles of the platform, we began ideating what it would look like using hand drawn representations.
Concept Testing
Ultimately we decided to focus on the onboarding process for further prototyping and testing. In order to understand whether the concept of the app would fit our users’ needs, we wanted to see how our users felt as they went through the onboarding process, and whether the product concept seemed like something that they would actually want to use. We each made our own prototype to reflect what this process will look like - I created mine using Google Slides.
Usability Testing
Finally, another member of our team brought all of our ideas together into a figma prototype for testing.
Our usability research was designed to investigate the users’ emotional experience and overall feedback on the onboarding process. We conducted this testing using a think-aloud protocol and semi-structured interviewing. Participants were given the tasks of reading about the product and taking the online quiz while taking on the characteristics of our user personas. The personas were:
Gabby Guide: a parent who wants to learn about ways to help their child build online safety skills
Sally Shield: a parent who wants to learn about ways to take more protective measures to prevent the negative consequences of online exposure
Unsure Parent: a parent that is looking for internet safety information but unsure exactly which topic
Through our tests, we learned that users enjoyed the color palette, the quick and easy-to-understand process, and the personalized results. We also discovered some ways to improve our design like users preferring less text on the screen at once. To fix this we divided text into small chunks and added an option for them to skip past the reading. Other than these changes our participants enjoyed the onboarding process and we gained information that would be useful in a final design of the platform.