Designing a children’s app? 5 Factors to keep in mind
Prioritizing the safety and protection of kids in your UX design
It comes as no surprise that 85% of 8–12-year-olds use social media and many of them own their mobile phones, so the internet is highly accessible to them. These numbers have increased more during the current Covid-19 pandemic.
With this, it’s more likely for many early teens to come into contact with harmful content or people than ever before.
Because of this, there have been discussions to strengthen rules and regulations towards digital products to heighten safety measures, protecting the rights and data/ information of kids. This trend urges parents’ awareness to know and guide how their kids (under 13 years old) explore and use digital products.
Considering its importance of protecting underaged children, the team at 55 Minutes is keen to gain insights on how UX plays a role in designing safety measures.
Having researched children’s apps and their safety measures, here are five important considerations you should keep in mind when designing apps that involve children.
Note that mobile apps included in this article engage both parents and kids as users.
1. Prevent children under 13 years old from signing up without parents’ consent
Be mindful of current rules and regulations. This not only protects your product, but also complies with privacy regulations for kids!
Based on COPPA (in the US), GDPR (in EU), and PDPA here in Singapore, the commonly agreed regulation is:
- Children under 13 years old are required to gain parents’ consent to sign up for apps/website services and access their services
- Children under 13 years old are required to gain parents’ consent to collect their data (e.g. photographs, images, geolocation information, etc.)
Also, ensure that your product sign-up process and certain parts of services have sufficient safeguards to make sure kids do not pretend to be their parents to access the service! Here are some methods you can use to prevent underage children from signing up without parental consent.
- Birthday verification: Make users enter their birthdays and if they’re below 13, do not allow them to proceed with the further steps
- Email verification: Verify their email as email creation is only allowed for children older than 13 years old
- Have parents create ID and Passwords of children: Parents can create their kids’ ID and password. Having an identification approval step for parents would help to confirm who is creating the account
- QR code or Access code: Generate an access code to send to parents’ phones so that kids can only access the app with the code
2. Make terms and conditions clear and well understood in parents’ perspectives
Have you heard of a YouTuber trying to read the terms and conditions of all apps on a smartphone? 😂 It took them 31 hours to read it all. Yes, product planners don’t make it easy lengthwise, but also through all the unfamiliar legal terms.
So, what do you think would happen to busy working parents? They’ll probably just tick the checkbox without reading, thus not knowing what they are consenting to! This would cause them to agree to use an app without knowing how their data and kids’ personal data would be used or shared with others.
The good news is, you can help parents better understand what they’re agreeing to by giving key points of your terms and conditions, such as what type of information/data your app will collect and how that information will be used. ☝Keep in mind that you should never sacrifice having good terms and conditions just to make it easier for parents to understand them.
Another way would be creating friction in UX, a moment to slow down. Ironically, UXers are taught to create UX seamlessly, but friction, in this case, would hinder parents from ticking the box and onboarding the product quickly.
3. Design notification settings for the children’s perspectives
You’ll usually see notification settings after you tick the checkbox in the terms and conditions. In general, notification settings are related to your product’s clear purpose, explaining why your product needs to access certain data such as audio recordings, photographs, and video access.
In this step, brief communication via your app is key to helping parents and kids be aware of which data your product will access. Try to communicate it step by step to make sure parents and kids understand your intention on data access. Make the written tone engaging and inviting!
Although they set the data access in the app onboarding steps, try to make the setting unhidden in the menu, allowing your users to access them easily, so they can easily adjust the setting again whenever they want.
4. Create informative, engaging, and interactive onboarding steps and guides for children
I’m sure you’ve experienced some apps that do not provide proper onboarding steps—the users struggle to know about the main feature, are not clear what the app is about, and how they will benefit from this app.
The onboarding process of users is when your users form their first impression about your product and decide whether they want to proceed with further steps. Thus, if you are a UX designer, it is important for you to design an effective onboarding experience.
Having users such as children below 13 years old means adding extra considerations in designing the onboarding experience.
- Make the tone and language easy to understand and engaging! Try to think about the lingo used by early teens, and how they like to be addressed.
- Choose appropriate images! Do quick contextual research, what kids consider to be cool, and what type of images that they can resonate with.
This will increase the level of kids’ engagement and interest in your product as well as cater to them to better understand how your product will be useful and beneficial to them.
5. Include safety measures in the app for worst-case scenarios
Remember that we need to consider some unexpected situations that could happen, especially when early teens are exploring social media apps. Think of the worst-case scenario: how might kids be manipulated in your products and how can your team protect them and help them take the right action in those scenarios?
For example, in Messenger kids, the child can use the “Report/block” feature if a stranger approaches them with an inappropriate photo or text. The “SOS” button in FindMyKids/Pingo can be used when a kid is encountering bullying or a stranger in their location.
Both examples are good cases for how a digital product addresses the kids’ safety while they are using the product. Make sure all those emergency buttons are visible and easily accessible in an urgent situation.
An Easy Checklist for You
To sum it up, below is a checklist you can use to make sure you design appropriate safety measures as you’re developing an app where users might include children under 13 years old.
• Have you defined what features are available and accessible to children (under 13 years old)? And what features are needed as a safeguard?
• Have you crafted an overview of the summary of terms and conditions to give parents an understanding of what they consent to when using your product?
• Have you designed data and notification user settings as steps in an engaging and interactive way to inform what types of personal information and data your product needs to collect?
• Does the onboarding process of your product communicate to kids by using their language and images that suit them?
• Have you thought of any worst case scenarios that can happen to kids while they are experiencing your product? Also make sure that features to ask for help in situations are easily accessible.
Do remember that your target users’ behaviors will be shaped by how we design!
“Don’t just concentrate on the technology, but on the design decisions — work through unintended consequences before you implement it.” (from E&T online blog, July 15, 2020)
We tried to apply the above checklist to design the UX for our app, Capy, as we’ll be interacting with children in our app. We hope that you’re able to use the above to create a digital product that ensures kids’ safety while still being engaging for kids to use!
If you’re interested in learning more about our work, you can reach out at hello@55mins.com.
Hye Yoon is a UX researcher at 55 Minutes. She has a Bachelor’s in furniture and spatial design from Seoul, South Korea, and has a Master’s in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, she lives in Singapore, observing her surroundings from the lens of a tourist from time to time. She loves nature and goes cycling every weekend in the Northeast region of Singapore.
