Smart Phone Parental Control
Projekt202, 2013
Problem - Our client realized that although there are parental-control products available for smartphones, parents weren't using them. Our client asked us to find out what type of smartphone parental controls parents needed and would use.
Additional Challenges - Most parents are overwhelmed by technology their kids use all the time and—as parents say—“Just seem to get". And since there are a variety of parenting styles, there should be a variety of parental-control options to satisfy everything from minimal to maximum restriction.
Interviews
We visited parents and children at home and conducted contextual observations and interviews with them. We asked about smartphone usage and noted parents' concerns about their children's use of them.
Key Findings: Although many parents we met with were concerned about their children's access to devices and set up parental controls for TVs and computers, most hadn't thought about parental controls for their kids' smartphones.
Analyzing Findings
We distilled key insights from our interviews and created an affinity diagram that helped us uncover different parent concerns. This included how parents felt about managing their children's smartphones, plus their own relationship with technology. While all parents want to protect their kids. They all had different ideas about what they wanted to protect them from and how they wanted to do it. We identified three key parenting types based on our research.
Key Findings: Parents already felt they were pulled in too many directions, and the idea of managing their kids’ smartphones seemed overwhelming.
Concepting
Using our findings we brainstormed a variety of features, narrowing them down to those most helpful to parents. Using those features, we crafted a story with eight scenarios to test with the parents.
Focus Groups
We created a group of parents we’d previously interviewed along with some we hadn’t met with before. We shared our designs and a questionnaire asking them to rate how the different features made them feel. At the end of the testing, the parents participated in a design concepting activity.
Key Take-Aways:
- Parents need simple setup
- Parents need help when new types of concerns arise.
- Parents desire different levels of control depending on their parenting style.
- Parents want insights into their children's behavior.