Project Vision

YouTube Kids is one of the most popular apps used by kids.  A significant portion of user reviews from Google Play Store revealed frustration among users related to the content and limited user control.  This project aims to improve the UX by improving parental control for content curation and improve features that cater to diverse needs, including those of autistic children.

Challenges

  • Enhancing parental control for content curation
  • Preferred language set up
  • Maintaining simplicity, familiarity and ease of navigation

Kick Off

For this project, I analysed user reviews from Google Play Store for 6 month period (January to mid June 2024) to identify user pain points.  The themes derived from the review could be categorised mainly into four categories - content-related concerns, feature requests, specific usability issues, and emotional responses.

Personas

PLS GIVE US OPTION ON HOW TO FILTER VIDEOS/CHANNELS BASED ON LANGUAGE. I DONT WANT MY CHILD WATCHING VIDEOS USING DIFFERENT LANGUAGE, I KEEP ON BLOCKING THOSE CHANNELS EVERYDAY BUT, NEW CHANNELS KEEP ON APPEARING ON MY CHILD'S YT KIDS FEEDS. PLS FIX IT!

Bad design app, you can find subscribed channels way to hard, the app start in recommended one, when you want to adjust something in parents setting, they always ask you for math problems, and after that you can add your password every time. And the app is very flashy, make it simple! Double tap on Fullscreen! 1 tap, is anoing! And 1 star is to much!

Please fix this issue. I see that there are a lot of forums with so many parents having the same issue. Especially for those of us with autistic children, routine is a serious thing for our little ones. They won't understand why all of the usual videos they are used to scrolling through aren't there so saying to "use the logged out" option isn't actually helping. So please HELP and get this mobile/gmail issue fixed. Please 🥺.

Unfortunately, some videos are listed for kids when they shouldn't be, so regular old adults need to use this version. This AWFUL app is the total opposite of "ergonomic". This app version only allows for clumsy horizontal viewing orientation (no one [even kids] would be using this for gaming, so vertical orientation should be allowed). Terrible search options & no history! This version doesn't give you a full run down of all videos & omits [G-rated] results for I know exist within YouTube. F!

Wireframe

The main goal of the wireframes were to create an app that is easy to curate content, to navigate, to make the UI more user friendly.

While a formal user testing wasn’t done for this project, the design prioritised addressing pain points with the current YouTube Kids app.

Design decisions:

  • Parental Control: The parental control empowers you to create a safe experience.  It lets you select recommendation by categories, block and unblock content with ease and  control YouTube Kids app through YouTube app from anywhere.
  • Preferred Language Settings: The app lets you choose languages, whether you want your little one to experience your home language or expand horizons with new languages.
  • Simplicity, familiarity and ease of navigation: This update prioritises simplicity, familiarity, and ease of navigation and thereby enhances user experience for everyone, including autistic children.
  • Curation:  A single unified curated folder for subscriptions, favourites, history, downloads, and shared content.
  • Search:  The enhanced search option lets you search across the app and within specific categories
  • Ease of Access:  The settings screen can be accessed only with Passcode.  If no Passcode is the user can still access settings with one step access through your Google Account (no math required).  The vertical more icon has quick and easy access to more options like
  • Report inappropriate content
  • Block content (specific video, or of the same creator or similar content)
  • Download videos with the desired resolution
  • Add to favourites
  • Remove videos of unwanted languages
  • Screen Layout: Users can now choose to view the app in landscape or portrait mode, whichever suits their preference.
  • Timer:  You don’t need to scroll anymore; simply enter the desired time of viewing.

Takeaways

This is my first project into designing improvements on an existing product.  Taking insights from the reviews from Google Play Store I used design decisions to create a more user friendly app and to cater to a wider audience.  This exercise strengthens my ability to design with user experience in mind.

Tools and Resources

User Interface:  Figma

Images:  Stock images from Freepik, and Unsplash.   Custom images from Gemini using my description.
Content Ideation and text: I used Gemini for brainstorming ideas and content ideas.  This helped me refine my text and explore different approaches.

VANDANA VASUDEVAN