Azoomee Chat - Head of Design

Azoomee offers a wide selection of inspiring TV shows, action packed games and creative activities for children aged five to ten. All of the content in the app is carefully selected to provide a positive and safe screen time experience.

What I did

Whilst working as head of design I lead the creative direction and execution across all Azoomee brands and was responsible for UX/UI design and research. I reported directly to the Chief Product Officer. One of the projects that I was most proud of was the app’s chat feature and it’s surrounding ecosystem. As well as allowing parents and children to chat safely, it also gave parents the ability to invite and accept friend requests from either within the app or via an external site for parents, where they could also monitor conversations.

Work that I was responsible for included

Defining the scope of the overarching chat ecosystem
Designing the parents website
Devising a four step invitation system
Design of children’s chat experience
User testing - remote and guerrilla
Comissioning illustrators to create sets of sticker packs, including redesign of the app’s mascots the Oomees

Defining the scope of work

As this as a large feature which would potentially have a lot of moving parts and that would have considerable impact of the overall user experience and software architecture? I felt that it as important to define the scope of work. I workshopped this with the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer.

Core areas to consider where -

Revisiting the app’s on boarding
Defining the core chat features
The first time chat walkthrough
Allowing parent’s and children to safely add friends from within the app
Allowing parents to monitor their kids conversations and friendship requests
As the app is designed to be used by several siblings in a family group we’d also have to think about how kids could switch profiles easily - Switching user profiles
In app and push notifications
family to family chat

From the information captured from this meeting I was able to map out at high level the child and parent user journeys.

Parent’s site

One of the major design tasks was to create a site for parents so that they could manage their account and children’s profiles without having to go into the core Azoomee app. I worked up detailed user journey flows for the parent’s experience. Some of the main features and functions to design for where -

Sending and accepting friend requests
Moderation
Social sharing
Chat
Login & Sign-up
Account editing
Help & Support

I used these user journey flows to brief the technical team and to inform the design of the screens. I designed the screens to feel like a chat app when view on a mobile screen and utilising Azoomee’s brand colours. I created a design library for the technical team, supplying all of the assets in Zeplin.

I designed the screens to feel like a chat app when view on a mobile screen

Invitation Mechanism

The invitation mechanism is at the heart of the new ecosystem and we needed to ensure that this was secure. This would need to be accessible from both the parent’s section inside the app and the external parents site. I worked closely with the Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology on this, we decided to abandon the family to family invite system, settling on a solution where each child is given a unique eight digit ID code. This would become part of a four step process

Each child is given a unique code.
The parent can share this either via the parent’s section of the app and via parent’s site by using a standard share sheet
The user being invited then adds this code from within the app or parent’s site to their child’s profile to accept the invite.
To protect against the child’s code getting into the wrong hands, the inviter then has to confirm that the request was sent.

Invitation Validation

Prototype Invision
To validate this mechanic I created a prototype using Invision, that I then guerrilla tested on members of the team at Azoomee and friends in my own network. I rapidly iterated on this until I was satisfied that we had a clear and understandable flow.

Usertesting.com
Later once the chat feature had been fully implemented I further validated the invitation mechanism by remote testing on Usertesting.com. We gave the test candidates access to a dummy account with a fictitious child profile set up on it and asked them if the could send an invite to an email address that we provided. The email was set up with an automatic reply to accept the invite so that we could then see if the understood how to confirm the invitation.

Children’s Experience
We commissioned an external agency to design and create a prototype for the children’s chat experience. Whilst the design tested well, there were a few areas that I identified improvement.

These were -

Simplifying the contacts screen.
Moving the sticker icon down so that it was next to the text field.
Highlighting the text input field when it’s active.
Increasing the font size and changing the background colour of the user’s sent texts, to aid legibility.
Moving the sticker selection tray so that it sat inline, underneath the text input field.
Adding a report button to tie in with the moderation features on the parent’s site.
We also removed the ability to access the camera role for security reasons.

I created the second iteration of the chat app folding in the above changes.

Phone View
Azoomee had been designed to be used by kids with tablets, but because we now wanted adults to chat to their children using the product on their own devices, we decided that this should be the first part of the app where the design would need to adapt to a phone screen. So I created a second set of designs for the phone view.

Stickers

We wanted to have our own bespoke stickers in the app featuring the Oomees, mischievous characters who are Azoomee’s mascots. The original character designs felt bit static and I wanted more emotive poses so that we could use these with type in exciting ways. I commission a very talented artist Trevor White to work up a set of posses drawn at a three quarter view. I also commissioned two other artists Caroline Masterton and Jane K. to create a variety of different sticker packs to use in the app.

Marketing / User Aquisition

I was responsible for generating all of the artwork for our various user acquisition campaigns across a variety of social platforms. For the new chat feature this included advertisements that were designed to sit on the lock screens of Amazon Fire tablets. Theses were designed to work on portrait with another design that would display when the device is rotated to landscape.

Results

Once the app was released we used Mix Panel to keep a track on the number of, invites sent, accepted and validated. We also tracked the number of messages sent and stickers sent. The most popular sticker was somewhat unsurprisingly the Oomee Poo Emoji! The chat feature gradually gained traction over the next few months. The user acquisition campaigns run by the Marketing Manager were incredibly successful, resulting in Azoomee regularly reaching the top ten in the kids apps on the Apple App Store. Shortly after I left Azoomee the app was featured by apple as App of The day.