Youdoido
A client-based project to design a video streaming platform for children to promote cyber wellness before entering the mainstream market. Our team's deliverables are to provide an MVP mobile app that meets their business and development goals.
Overview
Duration & Team
My Role
Project Focus
Tools
3 Weeks
3 Members involved
UI Lead designer
UX Researcher
MVP
Mobile Application
Figma
Miro
Otter.ai
The Problem
As society becomes more reliant on technological advances, it is inevitable for children to use video streaming platforms for leisure to educational purposes. The inaugural 2020 Child Online Safety Index report found most children were affected by cyberbullying, either as bullies themselves or as victims.
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From the insights gathered from User Research, Youdoido saw a market opportunity in the edutech industry; to create a safe environment for children to nurture their character development while cultivating a cyber wellness culture.
Discovery
The Solution
Our app aims to build a safe playground for children by children to practice content creation and social media before they reach adolescence or enter the mass market.
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We came up with a way to bridge the engagement of children while appeasing the concerns of parents. Furthermore, we consider the client's goal of fostering curating value-driven content to foster a cyber wellness community.
01) Parents assurance
Parents feature:
To ease the mind of parents; an easy to manage and monitor layout for each child's account and a simplified infographic to display genre and screen time.
02) Exploring what's passion
Children features:
A simplified homepage and navigation menu that allows children to access the functions they are looking for easily.
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Users can filter content by the subject of interest.
03) Competitive spirit
Children features:
Users can participate in simple challenges to build their skills while competing with their friends to score points. ​
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A leaderboard page promotes a friendly competitive spirit among their social circle, in terms of ranking and total score.
Research
DISCOVERY
Competitive analysis
Features inventory was performed across several key industries: Social media, Video platform, and Edutech. Breaking down into comparison criteria enables us to observe the unique functions that give their corresponding app a competitive edge. The table below shows a compilation of our findings that could be incorporated into our designing solutions.
The Process
User Interview
Due to the nature of a child app, our target audiences were not only children between 6 - 12 years of age, who are active on screen time for either games or videos, but their parents who have provided this access. We have conducted a user interview among 5 parents and 7 children with the following goals in mind. To understand:
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Parents’ concerns on screen time and apps usage by children.
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How children consume video content and their preferences.
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Children’s interest in content creation and video filming.
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How children interact with their friends.
Synthesising
Define
Insights
I managed to transcribe the user interview before synthesising the results using affinity mapping into potential patterns before condensing them into parent and children insights respectively.
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Persona
Key insights were consolidated into our two user personas' pain points and goals to further emphasise their end-to-end experience.
1 ) Primary persona: A child who wants to watch or upload content;
2 ) Secondary persona: A parent who is concerned regarding the child's viewing experience.
Information Architecture
When designing our initial sitemap, we drew on our child persona's goal and research insights while simultaneously considering the client's business demands — the "Challenge" feature, which is part of their proposed business model.
After usability testing, we realised that children had a difficult time searching through the navigation menu and pages for a certain feature as part of their task. Thus, further simplifying the top-level navigation and 2nd level content of the sitemap.
User Flow
To understand how our potential users will likely navigate through our app or on any competitor site, the user flow was mapped out into 3 paths: Login-Onboarding, finding a video to watch, and record to upload content. Through this planning, we had to consider onboarding pages that promote cyber wellbeing and the solutions that we have proposed to our clients.
Ideation
Design
Usability testing
To experience and understand the navigation flow of the users, usability testing was conducted on our working prototype on 1 pair of participants, both parent and child. With a total of 6 tasks, they were split based on our target audience:
Parent only
1) Account creation process
2) Time setting procedure
Child only
3) Login into their account
4) Finding a badminton video, like and report it
5) Record and upload your own content
6) Participant in a challenge.
Analysis methods
After each usability testing, we analyse our findings using pluses/deltas to observe what could potentially improve the users' satisfaction. A total of two Usability Tests were performed and the results can be read under "Design Systems".
Sketches
Utilising our user flow, we brainstormed and sketched out our vision of the various sections of our wireframe.
We discussed our solution ideas and heuristic layout within the internal team before elaborating them to our client.
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After some positive feedback, we further refined our concepts during our prototyping stage.
Feature Prioritisation
After understanding the users’ needs and insights, we focused on essential features for users to complete the basic tasks with ease. We prioritised key features for the app that fall into the “High impact / Low effort” quadrant of the graph, followed by features in "Low impact / Low effort". The remaining features under "High impact / High effort" were only included if the development team has the ability to incorporate those concepts into fruition.
Prototype
Deliver
Design Systems
During our user interviews, we invited children to share their favourite colours and design styles. Surprisingly, most of them preferred cool tones and colourful gradients on a dark backdrop. We followed up with a survey of 13 new participants, aged 6-12, to have a better sample size and perception of a child's colour and style preferences. Leading the UI design, I developed the style guide and component library inspired by the user interview and survey outcomes.
Design Iteration
Consolidating both sketch and design systems, we could execute our prototype for our mobile app. With each round of usability testing and plus/delta analysis, we reviewed and modify our prototype from version 1 to 3 (left to right). Notable feedback and design improvement are summarised as shown.
Final Thoughts
Future Steps
During our UT2, our research finding shows an interest for parents who preferred to know how much time their children spend on educational & non-educational videos. Future steps could be to provide a more thorough Usage report. Furthermore, there was a redesign on the parent's dashboard, indicating a need for more Usability Testings.
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Through the usability tests, children from 6 to 8 had difficulty navigating our prototype due to a lack of familiarity and limited vocabulary. Thus, in a future iteration, a separate version that is more succinct and lighter could be realised to target a younger demographic. Moreover, our studies indicated that most children are competitive in nature. The future UX team can further refine opportunities to leverage the users’ network to increase engagement and participation rate.
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Finally, there is a need to create a website to strengthen the brand identity and build credibility. It serves to encourage business opportunities from various potential sponsors as their business model.
Reflection
My biggest takeaway was to be firmed in my design decisions while being open to constructive criticism. During meetings with internal members and clients, there are situations where the solutions I proposed were questioned. This led me to reason and convinced the respective stakeholders using my research findings. Our user interviews and usability testings indicated the issues we have to address. Through the proposition of a user-centric solution, we can achieve our end goal by improving the fulfilment of our target audience.
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However, one aspect we could improve upon was efficiency. Since our work for each phase of the project was equally divided, the lack of trust and the need for constant management will slow down our overall performance. We could have adequately assigned our task based on our strength to increase our productivity. After each assignment is completed, we could discuss "What we have completed", "How we approach our assignment", and "why".