Family Features: Parental Controls, Family Play, Kids Mode, Common Sense Media
Family Features solved several initiatives that revolved around content intended for children 12 and under, family focused user experience, and update the platform with a valuable addition.
Goals
Adopt a family friendly approach and capture market share of Walmart’s largest demographic, busy mom’s looking for the best deals.
Approach
Parental Controls: Create PIN access to the Vudu streaming site and allowing parents to determine what kind of content their kids can purchase and watch (based off of MPAA ratings.
Kids Mode: Build a safe environment that provides access to purchased and free content for children.
Family Play: When this option is enabled the content playing will blur or silence scenes to filter, skip past, and silence strong language, violence, substance abuse or sexual content from select PG to R rated movies.
Age-based Reviews: Provides ages-based reviews about the type of content of a specific movie so that parents can make informed decisions about purchases for their children. This type of information has high value based off surveyed conducted with 100 responses by mom’s 25 and older. This feature is a partnership with Common Sense Media and lives on the media details page.
User’s Needs
Dual personas PARENT > CHILD.
The Parent: The busy (working) mom with one or more children who benefits from utilizing the streaming platform to occupy their kid/s or watch movies and tv shows together without worry about unmonitored or unfiltered content and/or unapproved purchases.
The Kid/s: Children aged 12 and under who can browse within a kid friendly environment.
“I worry about my child having control of the remote and purchasing content without my consent.”
“I’m not always sure if a title has material that is ok for my kids. I wish there was a friendlier way to decide if a title is good for our family.”
Impact Perspective
Develop several features that covers all the bases of parental controls while providing a safe ecosystem for kids and families.
Relieve many pain points that parents face when choosing titles for their family to consume.
Enhance user experience by offering more controls through passcodes, age restricted content, safe blurring of potential adult concepts and scenes, and providing multipoint information based on the type of content a title may have.
Increase engagement while expanding into a new user base.
Design Constraints
Linking parental controls to the Kids Mode sub-account.
Consider potential loopholes where an undesired action, such as purchase flow, is initiated by the child.
Categorizing metadata on the back end and ensure no undesired copy, images, or assets are available when the child is in Kids Mode.
User testing/research should be conducted to identify easy of use and further validate MVP happy paths in the features.
Parity all initiatives across all available platforms utilizing existing material design.
What pain points exist that may cause confusion on how to use the new features.
