TIMELINE
October 2021
Two Week Sprint
TEAM
Esther Choi
Holly Jackson
ROLE
Esther and I worked collaboratively on both the research and design phases of the project, following the Design Thinking methodology. My detail-oriented approach was the perfect complement to Esther's big picture thinking.
METHODS
User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, User Personas, Journey Mapping, Competitive and Comparative Analysis, Task Flows, Appmap, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing
TOOLS
Figma, Whimsical, Zoom, Google Workspace, iOS HIG (Human Interface Guidelines), YouTube and YouTube Kids Design Systems, Canva
* Disclaimer: On March 25, 2022, YouTube announced that they are now allowing video sharing between YouTube and YouTube Kids, but when Esther and I worked on this project in October 2021, it was not an option.
Project Overview
The Challenge
YouTube Kids was launched in 2015 as Google’s answer to parents’ concerns over YouTube’s unregulated content, but has itself been plagued by controversy over what it shows to kids. Parents of young children who use the app are frustrated by its focus on consumerism, and by the lack of options available to them when it comes to deciding what their children can and can’t watch. Parenting styles, methods and values vary widely, and most parents have definitive views on what is appropriate for their children at any given age.
YouTube Kids offers a blanket approach when it comes to parental settings, one that severely limits caregivers’ ability to customize or approve content, and essentially places its algorithm in charge of determining what constitutes kid-friendly material.
YouTube Kids, with its bright colors, distinctive animations, and easy to navigate user interface, clearly understands how to cater to its primary audience: children. However, the app is neglecting the needs of another part of its user base that one could argue is more crucial to its survival than the kids it courts: the parents who decide whether or not to let them use it.
The Solution
I was part of a small team focused on re-envisioning how YouTube Kids could better serve parents. During a two week design sprint, executed as part of our coursework for General Assembly's User Experience Design Immersive, my classmate, Esther Choi, and I explored the root causes of parents’ frustrations with the app.
We sought to gain a nuanced understanding of parents’ needs and frustrations, so that we could develop solutions to better serve them, while preserving the qualities of the app that make it so appealing to kids.
Our solution was to build parents a bridge between the YouTube Kids app and the original YouTube app, allowing them to manage their children's accounts with ease from YouTube's more adult-friendly interface.
The Problem: An Algorithm is a Subpar Sentinel
Background Research
The YouTube Kids app currently allows parents to place their child in a designated age range (4 and under, 5 to 8, and 9-12), and then the app’s algorithm selects the content it deems appropriate for that age range. Parents have to set these restrictions within the app, by answering a series of questions meant to stop kids from gaining access to them. If parents opt out of placing their child in an age range, they either have to allow the child to access all content or they have to manually add videos one by one.
The app’s algorithm is supposed to filter out content deemed inappropriate, but this isn’t always failsafe. It also places the burden on creators to self-regulate and accurately categorize their videos. There have been several instances of content slipping through that features depictions of familiar children’s characters behaving violently or suggestively. The FTC filed a complaint shortly after the app’s release, citing multiple examples of inappropriate content accessible through the app’s search function.
There has also been a lot of concern raised around the emphasis the algorithm places on ads and commercial content. The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood has argued that young children aren’t able to distinguish ads from content, and in fact this distinction is made blurrier by the proliferation of toy reviews and toy unboxing videos. These videos are primarily tied to channels run by kids and their parents, such as Ryan’s World and Vlad and Niki. These “child influencers” rake in tens of millions of dollars annually, which they earn through deals with toy brands, product placement and ad revenue.
In 2019, Google had to pay $170 million to settle allegations that YouTube collected children’s data from the app without their parents’ consent, for advertising purposes. As recently as April of 2021, a House subcommittee began investigating YouTube Kids for serving up what they called “a wasteland of vapid, consumerist content” to children, and called Google out for continuing to show kids targeted advertising, with hidden marketing smuggled into videos. The House research team found that a measly 4% of content on the app actually had any kind of educational content.
User Research
We talked to seven parents of young children who have experience using YouTube Kids. Five of them downloaded the app during the pandemic, as a way to keep their children busy while they were working from home. The parents we interviewed expressed similar frustrations with the lack of quality content available and with the extreme emphasis on materialistic videos about toys. Many of them also expressed dismay at the behavior modeled by the “kid influencers,” who often pull pranks and use demeaning and bullying language. Parents said they were concerned that their children were picking up these behaviors.
Almost all of the parents we spoke to expressed the desire to be more in control of choosing the content their kids watched, and frustration that their ability to do this is so curtailed.
Parents also illustrated how frustrating it is to access the parental controls, which are in the YouTube Kids app itself. The app is designed for small children with underdeveloped motor skills, is stuck in the horizontal position, and is riddled with animations even within the parental settings. It's annoying to navigate, especially on a phone, which is the device most parents use to access the settings.
Step 1: Guardians have to answer multiplication questions in order to get into the settings, which many noted are pretty easy for savvy kids to answer.
Step 2: Once in the settings, they then have to sign in using their Google account information in order to access each child’s particular profile.
Step 3: They have to rate their approval of the app by responding to animated prompts that seem purposely designed to further irritate stressed out parents.
Step 4: It's only once a parent has jumped through all these hoops that they realize they aren’t able to customize the content their child sees. They can either leave it up to the algorithm, or they can manually comb through and approve an unending list of videos.
Most parents we spoke to often end up going to regular YouTube to find videos for their kids to watch. This is because the algorithm that selects videos for the YouTube Kids app automatically filters out videos that aren’t specifically for kids, even if they’re age appropriate. Parents can't find the content they want in YouTube Kids, but don’t feel comfortable showing their kids videos on YouTube without supervision, because they have no way of knowing what's going to play next in the autoplay lineup.
Our research led us to develop two parent personas, representing two sides of the same coin: the desire to block certain content already available in the app, and the desire to enrich their child’s experience with additional content not available in the app.
Kevin Barden
"My son is very influenced by what he sees in the videos he watches. I notice that his behavior changes when he watches kids unboxing toys or behaving rudely."
Kevin is frustrated by the overabundance of videos on YouTube Kids that show spoiled young children unboxing toys and pulling rude pranks. His son, Jarrod, is at an impressionable age, so he mimics the bad behavior of the kids in the videos and begs for the toys they show off. Kevin tries to block videos and channels that feature toy unboxing, product placement and rude behavior, but it feels like a tedious, never-ending and futile effort, because new ones keep appearing daily.
Kevin needs a better way to control what Jarrod is allowed to watch on YouTube Kids, because many of the popular videos go against the values he wants to impart to him.
Jarrod Barden, age 4
"I like Cocomelon and Daniel Tiger. Also the Baby Shark song. It's silly. Sometimes I watch Ryan's World but my dad doesn't like that show because Ryan is not always nice."
Jill Robertson
"My daughter loves anything to do with animals, and I'm always surprised by how hard it is to find nature documentaries and silly animal videos on YouTube Kids. I guess it's because they're not specifically made for children. I often end up going to YouTube to find what I'm looking for, but it's definitely not kid-friendly."
Jill is often frustrated that she can’t find specific videos on YouTube Kids that she wants to show her daughter, Lily, even though the videos are age appropriate. She has to go to the adult YouTube to find them, but she doesn’t always feel comfortable playing them for Lily in the app, because she never knows what kind of content will load next in the autoplay. Also, she’s not always with Lily when she thinks of something she’d like to share with her.
Jill needs a better way to share specific content with her daughter, because the YouTube Kids offerings are too limited and she doesn’t think YouTube is safe for Lily to watch unsupervised.
Lily Robertson, age 5
"When I grow up I want to rescue animals. I'm going to have a really big farm and they can all come live with me. I'll have ten dogs and four cats and a llama and a sheep and a gecko named Susie."
We mapped out the journeys of our user personas as they struggled to navigate YouTube Kids, which allowed us to chart the exact points at which each of them became stymied. Two distinctly unhappy paths emerged, painting a picture of a truly dysfunctional relationship between parents and the app.
Kevin's Journey Map
Kevin attempts to block videos from the YouTube Kids app, featuring materialistic content that he doesn’t want his four year old son to watch. He wants to steer Jarrod away from toy unboxing videos and kids that model rude behavior.
"Daddy, I want this toy."
"It shouldn't be this hard."
"I don't have time for this."
"I wanna watch Ryan's World!"
Jill's Journey Map
Lily has recently become obsessed with geckos. Jill is trying to keep Lily entertained while she works from home. She would love to find a video with cool gecko facts that Lily can watch while she takes an important phone call, but she can’t find anything on YouTube Kids.
"Mommy, can you help me?"
"Let's see what YouTube has."
"I think I found a gecko video!"
"I can't let her watch this."
The Process: Adjusting the Controls
Competitive and Comparative Analysis
In preparation for the ideation phase of our project, we did a competitive analysis of other kids’ video-based apps — PBS Kids, Nick Jr., Netflix Kids, Disney Plus — and a comparative analysis of popular kid’s interactive apps — Osmo, Sago Mini World and Pok Pok Playroom — to see how they allow parents to customize content settings.
- 85% of the apps we analyzed offer educational content, and 60% of them are specifically marketed as educational tools. YouTube Kids' educational value is rated by most parent guides as poor.
- 60% offer in-app access to parental controls. The other 40% offer parents a way to control settings outside of the app (Netflix via their website, Osmo and Sago Mini World via a separate parent app). Almost all of the apps that allow parental access restrict this access via a special PIN or password, unlike YouTube Kids, which asks a simple math question.
- 60% of the apps are COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) certified, which means that they are not only compliant with the law but have been awarded by an official seal of approval from the FTC. YouTube Kids, on the other hand, has repeatedly run afoul of the FTC for flouting COPPA regulations.
- Only 40% of the apps have a user interface that adapts to the orientation of the screen. Fixed horizontal apps are easier for small children to use but more frustrating for parents when they're in the settings, as we discovered when interviewing parents about the YouTube Kids app.
- Only 30% of the apps allow parents to set a screen time limit. This is a concern that becomes more acute with the video apps that autoplay by default, which is the case for 75% of the ones we looked at (see Video Settings infographic below), and was the case for YouTube Kids until they came under fire for it.
- PBS Kids is the only app out of the ones we looked at that is completely free. Some of the content in the Nick Jr. app is free, but full-length videos are behind a pay wall. The other apps all require payment, most in the form of a subscription, thereby creating a gated level of higher quality content available only to families who can afford to pay for it. On the plus side, the fact that these apps are paid allows them to avoid relying on advertising as a source of funding, unlike YouTube Kids.
- As mentioned above, 75% of the video apps autoplay by default.
- 75% allow users to save videos to a playlist.
- Half of them allow users to search and download videos.
- Half allow parents to view their child's watch history.
- Only Netflix offers parents the ability to block specific titles.
We also found it notable that only two of the other apps (Netflix and Disney+) had a tiered system of approved content based on age. This seemed to be partly because all the other apps were geared towards younger children, but even so, these apps’ lack of restrictions governing their content suggested that the app creators weren’t worried about any of their content being inappropriate. The same could not be said of YouTube Kids.
Ideation and Initial Wireframes
Esther and I initially tried to figure out a way to make the parental settings in the YouTube Kids app more user friendly and accessible.
In our initial sketches for the redesign, we proposed that the sign-in process should be more secure, featuring a username and password unique to the app and to the parent, and also exclude unnecessary steps that didn’t enhance the security (no easy-to-guess math problems). Once the parent was in the app, the UI would adapt for an adult user and become more similar to regular YouTube, with the screen adapting to include a vertical orientation.
The more we researched and ideated, the more we realized that it would be simpler for parents to be able to access the settings for YouTube Kids via the regular Youtube app, which already had a built-in and easy to navigate settings structure.
When we found ourselves moving in the direction of working with the original YouTube app, we paused our ideation process to make sure that such a pivot would indeed be possible within the framework of both apps. Once we determined that our idea was feasible, we returned to the drawing board.
Using YouTube’s existing framework, we added a section for managing content, giving the parents far more control and customization of the content their child views. We decided it would be important to offer parents a way to block content in several ways:
- by genre
- by video
- by channel
- by keyword
We ran into some difficulty with semantics, specifically regarding the wording of “approve” versus “approved,” and “block” versus “blocked.” Did we want action verbs suggesting the initial processes, or did we want adjectives to describe actions already taken?
We also struggled with making the approved content and blocked content sections distinct enough, because we needed to make sure the two settings options didn’t conflict with or contradict one another.
Due to the time constraints in this particular sprint, we opted to focus specifically on the process of blocking content, and we chose to use the term “Blocked Content” because it encompassed the act of blocking but also implied that it was a destination for parents to view content they had already blocked.
We also decided it would be important to offer an option directly beneath a video when a parent was viewing it, where the parent could either share the video directly to their child’s account or block it from their child’s account. We added an icon to the existing menu, which features an option to upvote, downvote, share, download, or save.
Our new YouTube Kids icon, when clicked, would initiate a popup menu offering parents an option to select the child’s profile they want to interact with, and then the option to either share the video to or block it from that profile.
Esther and I plotted task flows illustrating potential happy paths for each of our personas with the aid of their distinctly unhappy retrospective Journey Maps. We then developed wireframes based on our ideation process and the two task flows.
Child's Profile Settings
accessible within YouTube app
Add or Block Video
new interactions beneath video
Usability Testing
When we reached a level of mid-fidelity, we tested them with four users. We presented each user with the following scenario for each persona:
Jill's Scenario:
Jill has a five year old daughter named Lily. She wants Lily to watch one of her favorite videos, a YouTube classic called “Ultimate Dog Tease,” which she hasn’t been able to find on YouTube Kids. She searches for the video on Youtube. When she finds the video, she wants to share it to Lily’s YouTube account. How would you do this?
Kevin's Scenario:
Kevin has two sons named Jarrod and Sam. They are all going on a camping trip this weekend so Kevin wants to find a video about camping to get Jarrod excited. He searches “camping with kids” and selects the first video that pops up. Unfortunately it turns out to be a Ryan’s World video in which he’s hawking all kinds of sponsored toys. He quickly realizes he wants to block the video for Jarrod. After blocking the video, Kevin wants to take it further and block Jarrod from seeing all videos tagged with the keywords "toy unboxing" and "toy reviews.” How would you do this?
While most users found Jill’s flow to be fairly intuitive, they ran into problems when attempting to send the video to her daughter’s account.
- Because of their familiarity with the “Share” icon, their instinct was to click on that in order to share the video to YouTube Kids. Three out of four users clicked it instead of the YouTube Kids button.
- Once they clicked on the YouTube Kids button, they were confused by the wording of “add video,” expecting to see the phrase “send video.”
Kevin’s flow also presented challenges for the testers, who weren’t expecting to be able to block videos directly from the video page itself. Users unfamiliar with YouTube also weren’t sure exactly where to locate the settings, because the ellipse icon for the profile page was lacking signifiers (such as an initial or a silhouette of a person) indicating its purpose.
We incorporated the findings from these usability tests into our next iteration of the wireflows. We recognized that with our addition of the YouTube Kids icon on the video page, we were introducing a novel process to our users, even those who were already accustomed to using the YouTube app.
- We added a tooltip to acquaint all users, from novice to experienced, with the functionality of the new icon.
- In the popup menu that appears when the icon is clicked, we changed “add video” to “send video.”
- We fleshed out the profile icon, adding an initial to the center of the ellipse to mimic YouTube’s existing profile icon.
- We also took out a step from Kevin’s flow that was unnecessary and confusing to users: the process of clicking on “Channels” once in the Blocked Content page of the settings. Because of Kevin's particular needs in this scenario, it makes the most sense for him to navigate directly to “Keywords” in order to complete his task.
Having successfully ironed out the kinks in our wireflows, we moved on to the process of creating realistic mockups for our redesign. We felt it was important to illustrate the impact of each persona’s actions on their child’s app, especially considering that the parents’ actions were performed within the context of the YouTube app. Our research found that kids overwhelmingly use iPads to access YouTube Kids, and for the sake of accuracy we wanted to illustrate this finding in our prototypes. We decided that the easiest way to do this would be to duplicate the file so that we could display the kids’ prototypes on an iPad. For an added dose of realism, we added GIFs to the kids’ mockups in order to mimic their animation-rich experience when opening the app.
The Solution: Handing Parents a Remote Control
In our proposed solution, YouTube will allow parents to manage the settings of their child’s YouTube Kids account via the regular YouTube app. The parental settings will be located within the intuitive and accessible structure YouTube users are already familiar with.
- Because the parental controls will no longer be accessible through the YouTube Kids app, children won’t be able to alter their own settings, and parents will no longer have to struggle to enter information into an app designed without their needs in mind.
- The newly added ability to block specific content by keyword, channel or genre will give parents more control over the content their kids watch. Parents will be able to customize the settings according to their individual preferences and parenting styles.
- They can also curate content for their child, by sharing videos and playlists directly to their child’s account.
Ultimately, providing parents with these new, highly customizable controls will restore their trust in YouTube Kids, a metric that has been negatively impacted by the app’s history of legal troubles and its association with questionable and materialistic content.
High Fidelity Prototypes
Jill and Lily's Scenario
Jill wants her five year old daughter Lily to watch one of her favorite videos, a YouTube classic called “Ultimate Dog Tease,” which she hasn’t been able to find on YouTube Kids. She searches for the video on Youtube. When she finds the video, she shares it to Lily’s YouTube account so Lily can watch it later. When Lily opens YouTube Kids on her iPad, she sees the video her mother shared with her.
Jill's Flow
Lily's Flow
Kevin and Jarrod's Scenario
Kevin has two sons named Jarrod and Sam. They are all going on a camping trip this weekend so Kevin wants to find a video about camping to get Jarrod excited. He searches “camping with kids” and selects the first video that pops up. Unfortunately it turns out to be a Ryan’s World video in which he’s hawking all kinds of sponsored toys. He quickly realizes he wants to block the video for Jarrod. After blocking the video, Kevin takes the further step of blocking Jarrod from seeing all videos tagged with the keywords "toy unboxing" and "toy reviews.” When Jarrod opens YouTube Kids on his iPad later that day and tries to search for toy unboxing videos, none appear in the search results.
Kevin's Flow
Jarrod's Flow
Recent Work
