Could the beta product be better?

Evaluate the product’s usability

I’ve been asked to review and improve a newly released beta product for a mobile device management platform software company.

The core audience for this product is Schools — (Work I’ve done “Make complex easy”). This same product now released a beta version for Parents.

What is mobile device management?

• Parents register their children and add their children’s devices to the software.
• Parents have access to control which sites, apps or content their children can access.
• Parents can track location, create when and where their children can access specific content, apps or sites.

So what’s the problem?

The beta version resulted in a slim downed version of the school product — a very technical software primarily for IT administrators.

Parents are different your audience range from your young hip and tech-savvy mom to your granny who’s not sure if I should right-click or left-click.

After the beta release users signed-up but no activity continued there after.

What does success look like for these users?

With the screen recordings from HotJar, I could measure some basic user behavior. This, however, wasn’t enough, I had several discussions with the product and support team who work more closely with the users and product to gain better insight.

First things first

There are two main tasks the user needs to achieve before they can successfully use the product.

1. Add their child
2. Link a device to their child

The core focus here is the user onboarding, finding the challenges and opportunities. Once these are achieved we can focus on user adoption and exploration.

Secondly, what would the user want to do

And how can we help them achieve those tasks?

There are several tasks for a parent we need to understand

• How would a parent set up restrictions on their child’s device?
• What would the parent control?
• How would a parent manage their restrictions and apply the control?

Let’s put it to the test

Now that I have a better understanding of the product I develop a usability evaluation that focusses on how well users can learn and use this product to achieve their goals.

User Assumption

• Add child profile with device
• Set specific app or site restrictions
• Set specific app or site restrictions at specific times or locations
• Track location of one or multiple children’s devices
• Use a home-owned device at school
• Control a school-owned device at home

Usability evaluations

I’ve evaluated the three questions we asked earlier “what the user would want to achieve” into 3 main journeys and how that is accomplished at the moment.

Evaluation of Journey’s

1. onboarding users
2. Setting control
3. Managing and setting advance control

Each journey consists of the sequential steps and evaluating the usability strengths, problems, severity rating, recommendations and examples of best practices.

Improve on major challenges

Now that we have a better idea of our major pain points we can focus on improving the steps with the highest severity ratings.

The first focus is to make setting control easy for our users. I’ve lead the ideation phase with sketching different flows and scenarios.

Sketching flows, tasks, questions, and exceptions

Working with the team’s visual designer we designed new flows and screens.

Zooming in — Setting different types of control

Taking the same distinct sections, I removed the side card renamed and re-ordered and inserted a description.

• Safe content → Web Filter: Restrict websites, video’s & YouTube categories for safe searching
• Applications → Block Apps: Manage apps on your child’s device
• Restrictions → Operating System settings: Restrict OS-specific usage
• Rules → Smart Control: Block and restrict your child’s device at a specific time and/or location

For easy navigation between children, we added the avatars at the top to switch between your children

Control setup — New on left and old on right

Setting protection level — New on left and old on right

Zooming in — Setting up Smart Control

The idea of smart control is setting control during specif times and locations.

Although it already existed in the current platform it was really hard to understand the goal and the flow.

I renamed the current section from “Rules” to “Smart Control”. This section the user can now set a timetable, location and view their smart controls in dashboard view.

Smart control setup, choosing control and viewing control dashboard

This was just some of the designs, I’m happy to discuss the entire thinking process behind my design decisions.

Thank you

Throughout the project, I worked closely with the UI designer the head of product, head of engineering, development team, and CEO.