Intel Security Safe Family
Product overview
Parenting in the digital age
Intel Security’s Safe Family is a parental control product designed to help busy parents stay connected with their kids and see what they are doing across all of their devices. Working under a small focused team consisting of a Product Manager, User Experience Designer, User Interface Designer, Content Writer, User Researcher, and a App Development team, Safe Family aimed to develop a modern parental control app that drove meaningful conversations and interactions among parents and kids.
Design process
Defining a creative strategy
The goal of Safe Family was to create a safe, cooperative, communicative digital environment where both parents and kids are engaged with their digital security.
- An engagingly simple digital safety solution with pre-set recommendations and settings.
- Ability to set up easily from any device.
Key problem area for parents:
- What are my kids consuming online?
- What are my kids sharing online?
- Who are my kids talking to?
- Where is my family?
- How do I manage all my kid’s devices?
Exploratory research
The first step in evaluating the start of developing Safe Family involved conducting thorough research and analysis. This included conducting 9 in-person focus groups consisting of three age groups in three U.S. markets (Parents of children ages 5 and under, parents of children ages 6-9, and parents of children ages 10-14) which represented the target market to gather qualitative insights.
Secondly, competitive analysis was examined which involved existing products in the market that catered to similar needs and studying their features, pricing strategies, strengths and weaknesses to identify opportunities and gaps.
The researched determined launching a parental control product was appealing to most parents and would be well positioned in the current market.
Evaluating the user journey
Prior to diving into the wireframing process, it was crucial to thoroughly evaluate the user journey for each major product flow. This evaluation process involves understanding how users would interact with the product at every step of their journey, from initial engagement to achieving their goals.
UI style guide
The UI style guideline was derived from the corporate branding which ensured consistency and coherence across all of Intel Security’s product line, reinforcing brand identity and enhancing user experience. This comprehensive guideline defined the consistent usage of colors across the interface, a set of iconography that represents various functions or features within the product, and typography specifications.
In parallel to the UI style guideline, an illustration visual style was defined which consisted of a set of 9 family members as a means of decorative elements and out of box experience.
Implementation
Onboarding
Developing the onboarding flow for Safe Family proved to be the most complex process. Consisting of over 50 screens, we aimed to simplify the difficult process of explaining to parents that in order for Safe Family to operate, both parents and kids devices must activate Safe Family. The onboarding process was aimed toward parents to set up their kids devices on their behalf.
UX considerations:
- Making it obvious to the user what steps are involved in creating their account.
- Walk the user through the features of the product and help them get started after creating their account.
- Thinking about the two (or more) devices as one product. Make it clear to the user which device they should be focused on and when they should be switching their attention to the other device(s).
Activity
The Activity Log was designed as the hub of the product. Parents would be able to view their kid’s activities from the comfort of their own device, eliminating the awkward notion of parents snooping on their kids.
Requests
The Requests tab allows parents to make rules flexible. By enabling conversations and interactions between parents and kids, families can collaborate and figure out when it is appropriate for some extra time or allow access to a blocked app.
Map
With GPS, the Maps feature provides a peace of mind for parents knowing where their kids always are. Using geofences, parents can receive automated notifications the moment their kids leave or enter a familiar place such as a school or library.
Rules/summary
Setting up rules for Safe Family were designed to be easy for parents. Based on their kids age group, default restrictions were already setup. However, for those parents who look for specific details, Safe Family also allows for specific restrictions ranging from category blocking to specific app blocking and daily time limits.
Currently, Safe Family has over 100,000 users worldwide, with an average of 3.5 star rating across iOS and Android app stores.
My role
As the User Interface Designer, I collaborated in real time with the UX Designer to define the product wireframes and updates based on user testing results in addition to developing the look and feel, iconography and illustrations. Considering Safe Family was developed concurrently across three platforms (Desktop, iOS and Android), I worked directly with the App Development teams (India and Argentina) to update specifications and advise on scene transitions.
Visual Design: User Interface Design, Branding, Iconography, Illustration
Year: 2014 – 2015
OS: iOS, Android and Desktop