Kinjo Kids iOS App
Overview
Every year more kids spend more time in the online gaming environments than ever before. As of today, an average child in the US will spend more time online than in school by the time they graduate. As parents, the only mechanisms (and services) of dealing with this that we have at our disposal are screen-time control, content blocking, and constant arguments.
Kinjo is on a mission to transform the screen time relationship between parents and kids by harnessing the power of kid-favorite platforms to help them learn and grow.
Kinjo provides kids with a world where they are rewarded for making good choices online. Parents get a window into that world with a weekly digest that shows them how they are spending their time online, who are they spending this time with, what skills they are learning and how cognitively challenging their online life is.
Role
Product Manager / UX Designer
Platform
iOS
Deliverables
Research, customer interviews, personas, user flow, wireframes, mock ups, prompt engineering, OpenAI API Integration
Execution
Problem
In the United States, children aged 6-12 spend an average of 3.5 hours per day, 27 days a month, on platforms like Roblox and YouTube, engaging in gaming and social activities.
However, parents often have limited visibility into these digital worlds, making it challenging to monitor and guide their children’s online experiences.
Research
Following comprehensive secondary market and competitive research, I discovered that the majority of existing products, such as Bark, Circle, Qustodio, and others, primarily offer solutions that enable parents to control, monitor, and restrict their children’s online presence.
Customer Personas
Through numerous interviews with parents, I found that their primary concern was not necessarily the lack of control, but rather the friction and negative impact that constant battles over screen time had on their relationships with their children.
I created several customer personas representing ideal early adopters open to an alternative approach. Each persona was based on insights from clusters of parents, focusing on addressing existing pain points, demographics, and a memorable quote that encapsulated the persona’s essence. Here is an example of one such persona.
Hypothesis
As part of our redesign, we restructured the taxonomy and information architecture of the product categories to simplify user navigation to personalized printable products.
We streamlined the category structure and added filters and sorting options, enabling users to refine their search results and find the products that best fit their needs.
Hypothesis #1
Light rewards can motivate children to change their online behavior and make better choices.
Hypothesis #2
Parents will perceive the resulting behavior change and insights valuable enough to be willing to pay a monthly fee for this service.
Ideation
To test the first hypothesis, I conducted an ideation session with the leadership team, aiming to identify opportunities for creating a habit-forming experience for eligible children.
This session resulted in several concrete ideas for developing an end-to-end activation journey and a habit-forming value proposition for children.
Userflow
I then concentrated on developing several detailed user flows, focusing on the end-to-end experience of the child, including onboarding, activation, and managing returning users.
These user flows also highlighted integration points with our key partner for the MVP: the Roblox gaming platform.
Wireframes
After achieving team alignment on the user flows, I created medium-fidelity wireframes for both the kid’s iOS app and Parent Insights that emphasized information architecture, user journey, and key interactions with the product.
I conducted hundreds of testing sessions on the UserTesting platform to validate and invalidate specific assumptions and decisions. This process helped to incorporate real parent feedback before investing further in the design and development of the actual product experience.
Kid iOS App mockups
Upon validating the wireframes with parents and other stakeholders, I collaborated with the design and engineering teams to execute the wireframes, resulting in a fully functional MVP in the form of an iOS application.
Parent Newsletter
I have designed a daily Parent Newsletter that would contain a story of how their child spent time online that day – which games they played, who they played with and what skills they’ve developed.
To ensure each story is unique every time I have leveraged the power of Large Language Models, particularly Open AI API and GPT 3.5 turbo to create a compelling narrative around the data.
Analytics
Lastly, I set up a Mixpanel dashboard to track key events and provide full visibility into user behavior, enabling the business to make data-driven decisions for future iterations.
Some of the reports included onboarding and activation funnel, key business events, set-up, “Aha” moments, habit moments, retention and churn, DAU/MAU, and unhappy path analysis.
Outcomes
As of April 2023, Kinjo Kid iOS app has over 20,000 active users with 30% MoM growth and over 80% retention rate.
There are currently over 2000 parents in the Kinjo wait list ready to start receiving their Weekly Digest and Kinjo is well on track for their Series A round.
