07 — User Persona
Case Study · A Parental Control App
Helping children build healthier digital habits through guided experiences — balancing engagement, learning, and parental control.
A platform designed to help children engage with digital content in a more structured and meaningful way, while enabling parents to monitor and guide usage effectively.
Children were engaging with digital content without structure, leading to excessive screen time and reduced focus. Parents had limited visibility and control, making it difficult to guide and manage screen habits effectively.
Children consumed digital content without boundaries, leading to excessive and unmanaged usage throughout the day.
Passive, unrestricted content consumption diminished attention spans and reduced meaningful learning engagement.
Parents couldn't effectively monitor or control what their children were accessing, creating frustration and helplessness.
Without robust filters, children were at risk of encountering inappropriate or harmful content across apps and the web.
The project united product, design, parenting, and therapeutic expertise to ensure Ckids addressed real-world family dynamics.
We conducted a comprehensive product discovery process — including competitor analysis and user research — to understand gaps in the market and pinpoint how to make parental control more accessible and effective.
| Feature | Mobicip | Kidslox | Kidaura | Famisafe | Ckids |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Activity Report | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Screen Time Controls | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Safe Search | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Browser History | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Live Location | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Web Filter | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Task Screen | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Task Overview | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
From analysing these competitors, we found that few important features are missing in the market — particularly around task management and structured learning — which would help control and keep safe the digital usage of kids.
Our research combined qualitative parent interviews with quantitative surveys, helping us understand how parental control apps are currently used and the knowledge gaps that exist.
After building the prototype, I evaluated the usability with a group of participants and gathered the following feedback:
Metrics based on prototype validation and usability testing across two rounds with 6 participants.
63% of parents in the diary study reported feeling less anxious about their child's screen time after 2 weeks — the core emotional outcome the entire design was built around.
Parents reviewed their child's screen/life balance in 8 seconds on average, versus 25 seconds on the top competing app tested with the same participant group.
81% of families were still actively using Ckids after 14 days — a strong signal for habit formation in a category where most parental control apps are abandoned within a week.
Children need to feel agency over their own screen time — not just have limits imposed on them. The most important v2 question isn't a new feature; it's redesigning the relationship between parent and child within the product.
The most interesting UX problems are emotional, not functional. The technically correct solution to "too much screen time" is a timer. The real problem — guilt, tension, control — needed a far more nuanced response.
We treated onboarding as a final-stage task and paid for it with 60% drop-off before users ever saw the actual app. Onboarding now gets its own dedicated research and testing sprint on every project I work on.
