Parent Dashboard
Released 5/2017
Role Sr. UX Designer
Summary
Amazon Kids (FreeTime in 2017) is an app that provides kids a walled garden to engage with entertaining and education content. It’s available on app stores and included in all Amazon Kids devices, with a 12-month subscription to the Kids+ subscription.
I entered Amazon after two years of children’s design at Nickelodeon. I was thrilled to work on a product that was ad-free and did more to protect children. However, the parental tools initially offered by the Kids app only provided tools on the single device that the kid used. Parent Dashboard provides more extensible tools for grown-ups, such as…
Ability to manage multiple kids’ devices at once.
Remote access to settings via the parent’s device.
Opportunities to whitelist content.
View a child’s activity.
Manage profiles.
I owned all UX artifacts for the launch and the following year.
Challenges
Parent Dashboard had to combine numerous, splintered services into a single view. Device registry, Households, Prime Video, Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle, and more all had to operate together without time-outs or unacceptable latency.
Results
Susprising engagement. Usage of Parent Dashboard had a slow and steady adoption over five years. On follow-up research, customers would set it and forget it, which is a trust-builder for customers.
The tech framework used for Parent Dashboard later got adapted to aid Echo Glow’s device setup.
Parent Dashboard was ahead of many of the upcoming privacy requirements to come. It became a resource to help future privacy iniatives across orgs.
Parent Dashboard had upsell opportunities to the Kids+ subscription and new devices.
For Hawks or Ostriches.
In early research, the team (UX/PM) identified two parental archetypes. Hawks were those parents actively engaged in their kids’ habits and activities. Ostriches would provide their kids an initial guidance, but would then let them lead themselves.
We didn’t want to bias or judge either parental style. Our features had to accommodate both types of customers; offering easy set-it-and-forget-it functionality and ample details for an attentive parent.
Activity and Discussion Cards
At Parent Dashboard’s launch, activity tracking was the main focus. Caregivers could have an overview of their kids’ overall time on their devices, broken down into categories. Each category had it’s own optional time limits, that would fill as the donut chart time would increase.
Category activity would break down the child’s usage over the last seven days and list which titles they would read, watch, listen, or play with.
Finally, for the hawks, select titles would have discussion cards. Over a thousand of Kids+ titles had extra themes, summaries, and discussion topics. This encouraged parents and kids to connect beyond devices and digital entertainment.
Whitelisting
Most customers who had Amazon Kids were subscribers to Kids+, a service that has thousands of titles of books, apps, videos, Audible books, and Alexa skills.
However, some of the most popular titles via the app weren’t provided by the subscription. A sizable fraction of customers used Kids without being subscribers at all. Parents needed whitelisting tools to curate their own children’s experience with the titles they own. Normally, this would only be done during initial app/device setup. Parent Dashboard became a touchpoint to give children titles over time, right after purchase, without needing their kid’s device.
Locking Devices
How do parents get their kids to put down their devices when dinner is ready? This is where locking devices, AKA Dinnertime was created.
Providing WiFi connection, locking a child’s devices would apply anywhere that profile was being used, all at once. This was initially slated for tablets, phones with the app installed (iOS, Android), but went on to include televisions, Alexa devices.
Tablet experience for locked device.
Building trust, with business value.
Parent Dashboard focuses on building customer trust through easy to access utilities. However, we didn’t want to create a product that didn’t allow for growth or sacrifice team headcount to make ongoing improvements. Parent Dashboard had opportunities to sign up for the FreeTime Unlimited (Kids+) subscription or learn more about upcoming devices (like the Kids Edition Dot).