Simplyfing complexity

UX Lead | Usability Analyst | UX writer

I’ve been asked to review and improve a newly released beta product for a mobile device management platform software company.

The initial product with a core audience for Schools (identified by a previous project “Lack of user conversion after trial period”). Released a beta version with a core audience for Parents.

Intro in mobile device management systems.

Parents register their children and add their children’s devices to the software.
Parents have access to control which sites, apps or content their children can access.
Parents can track location, create when and where their children can access specific content, apps or sites.

What do we know about the current product experience?

The beta version resulted in a slim downed version of their existing school product — a very technical software primarily for IT administrators.

Parent audiences range from your young hip and tech-savvy mom to your granny who’s not sure if I should right-click or left-click.

After the beta release parents signed-up but they have seen minimal activity after interested parents signed up to the platform.

At this point it’s important to ask what does success looks like for parents - as a business we want to increase conversion but to improve conversion we need to understand the parents behaviors first.

Parents are interested but not engaged

let’s understand why?

With the screen recordings from HotJar, I could measure some basic user behaviour. This, however, wasn’t enough, with several discussions and workshops with product, support and marketing teams we could gain better insights.

Where do the interest end

There are two main tasks the user needs to achieve before they can successfully use the product.

Add their child
Link a device to their child

These are also the barriers why users do not achieve their needs.

We need to understand what parents want to achieve

And how can we help them achieve those needs?

There are several needs for a parent we need to understand

Block and restrict specific websites and apps.
Control screen time based on content.
Manage screen time location and schedules.

I develop a usability evaluation on the current journeys to analyse key areas where users do not achieve their needs and how we can improve them.

Key features of current experience

Add child profile with device
Set specific app or site restrictions
Set specific app or site restrictions at specific times or locations
Track location of one or multiple children’s devices
Use a home-owned device at school
Control a school-owned device at home

Usability evaluations

I’ve grouped the evaluations into three phases based on what the user would want to achieve.

onboarding users
Setting control
Managing and setting advance control

Each journey consists of the sequential steps and evaluating the usability strengths, problems, severity rating, recommendations and examples of best practices.

Improve on major challenges

Now that we have a better idea of our major pain points we can focus on improving the steps with the highest severity ratings.

The first focus is to make setting control easy for our users. I lead the ideation phase by sketching different flows and scenarios.

Block and restrict specific websites and apps

Taking the same distinct sections, I removed the side card renamed and re-ordered and inserted a description.

Safe content → Web Filter: Restrict websites, video’s & YouTube categories for safe searching
Applications → Block Apps: Manage apps on your child’s device
Restrictions → Operating System settings: Restrict OS-specific usage
Rules → Smart Control: Block and restrict your child’s device at a specific time and/or location

For easy navigation between children, we added the avatars at the top to switch between your children

Manage screen time location and schedules

The idea of smart control is setting control during specif times and locations.

Although it already existed in the current platform it was really hard to understand the goal and the flow.

I renamed the current section from “Rules” to “Smart Control”. In this section, the user can now set a timetable, location and view their smart controls in the dashboard view.

Smart control setup, choosing control and viewing control dashboard

Other contributions

Throughout the project, I worked closely with the UI designer the head of product, head of engineering, development team, and CEO.