The Solution: Context-First Communication

The database style didn’t match any mental models and was in desperate need of a redesign. Hotjar recordings confirmed that users were spending excessive time navigating pages just to follow a single 5-minute conversation.

The “Aha” moment came from looking at my phone to text my wife. We weren’t stuck in 1999, why not mirror the phone architecture everyone was familiar with? I met with the dev team to confirm it was possible and then took it to the executive team. I received approval to redesign the feature and was asked to eventually redesign the entire ecosystem.

The Results: Quantifying Peace of Mind

The redesign mirrored regular conversation threads, a very familiar mental model for anyone who has used a smart phone. Users could easily enter a conversation, scroll through and navigate back to read the next thread of their choosing. The results and feedback were overwhelmingly positive, parents no longer had to spend hours sorting through nonsense and had context to have conversations with their kids.

Within the first three months of launch, customer retention saw a double-digit jump, a massive 19% Increase in User Retention.  The customer service team reported a significant drop in “usability-related” tickets regarding the monitoring feature. Users moved from “detective work” to “active monitoring,” with Hotjar data showing significantly more efficient navigation and higher feature engagement.

Massive Discovery: The Cool Part

The new text monitoring UI solved the major readability and discovery problems but an interesting new user behavior showed up immediately. Parents were scanning hundreds of messages at high speeds, they would click on links, watch videos, read texts and open photos. I had solved a problem but I didn’t solve THE problem.

Parents were spending significant time searching through conversations for specific material and I knew I could help. I spec’d out a new feature that would utilize AI to analyze data and report concerning material without parents having to endlessly scroll. If parents opted in to the feature it would read texts, analyze photo/video and report if links lead to inappropriate websites. Parents could set up the type of notification they wanted with custom schedules. Even cooler they could choose to blur the content so the child wouldn’t be able to see it unless it was approved by a parent.

The flagged text message section gave a quick navigation point to see all of the offensive content and the “perpetrators.” When a message was clicked it would auto navigate to show everything in context. Parents weren’t the only users and I believed that in order to have a true conversation with their child they needed as much information as possible. Cause knowledge is power. Parents would still have the ability to scroll through any and all conversations but the flagged content would be displayed based on their filtering preferences.

The Filtering: Giving Total Control to Parents

The UI for the filtering tool needed to be clean and simple to make sure that parents understood what they were controlling. User surveys, competitve analysis, and benchmarking other filtering products lead to these six catergories being our first iteration of the feature: Pornography, Profanity, Violence, Suggestive Content, Drug-Related Content, and Self-Harm. After opting in parents could set up automatic alerts for one, a few or all of our categories. 82% of users in the beta group reported more peace of mind and higher satisfaction with the product.  

Marketing Site Redesign

Before redesigning everything I set out to complete a UX audit using the Baymard Institute tools. We combed through the site finding what we did well and what we did poorly. My focus was to effectively enhance the user experience by providing information that was important and revelant to our users while they searched for which device was right for them.

Using a customized version of the Untitled UI design system we gave the site a more refined and clean aesthetic build, blending structure with functionality. The redesign helped users find what they were looking for, elevated completion rates, and facilitated seamless member checkout. The results are below.