Montage

Design a tablet application that caters to children aged 6-14, providing them with a platform to stream their favorite TV shows and movies on demand. The app should be user-friendly, engaging, and incorporate essential features that cater to both children and parents’ needs. These features may include an intuitive onboarding flow, robust security measures, and comprehensive parental controls for content and usage management.

In addition to the core features, we encourage you to explore and propose cutting-edge ideas that will elevate the overall experience and make our app stand out in the market. This could involve personalized content recommendations, social interaction capabilities, or gamification elements, among others. Our goal is to create a versatile and captivating application that not only entertains children but also fosters a safe and controlled environment for them to explore, as approved by their parents.

My initial thought of the app after reading the brief was that it would be a standalone streaming platform like Netflix. After looking at other children streaming products on the market, I began seeing some potential needs not being fulfilled from a parent’s perspective. I decided I would focus less on the streaming aspect of the app but more on parental controls. I read a couple of articles covering parental controls and common problems with existing technology around it. In my research, I found that screen time is a battle for many families with parents locking video game systems in the car overnight, or holding on to iPad chargers. I downloaded Amazon Freetime, and Google Family Link to research their parental controls. For researching the brand and visual tone, I signed up on Youtube Kids and BatteryPop (a small Nickelodeon offshoot).

Google Family link has an interesting product model. Having a separate mobile app on a parents phone to control multiple devices is convenient, and makes it harder for an intrepid child to hack into the controls.

Amazon Familytime links with an Amazon account to surface video content, audiobooks, e-books, etc. into the apps browsing feed. An interesting feature of the Amazon app is that you can gate video content behind reading and other education goals. Children can interact with books and educational content in the app to meet these goals.

Youtube Kids and BatteryPop have lush onboarding flows with illustrations and animations that stimulate the imagination and establish a fun atmosphere for kids.

Realizing that there’s no way to connect these apps together, most parents have a real chore in front of them for setting parental controls across multiple apps and platforms.

My sister has two boys. She let’s them watch the kids content on Netflix. During one visit I eavedropped on the show they were watching. I was surprised to hear dialog with subtle sexual themes. I flagged this to my sister and her reaction was that of indifferent defeat. She didn’t have the time to moderate and depended on the TV to keep them occupied during her working hours (she works from home).

I have a friend Scott who has a son and a daughter. His son is always on his tablet. I interviewed Scott to assess the value of a feature that automatically compiled clips from a watch history or from selected series into a moderatable montage. I told him there would also be a community section in the app where parents could post and discuss montages. He agreed these features would solve a problem for him, namely lack of time and lack of resources to moderate tons of content.

The concept is a tablet application which would house streaming content, with a companion phone app for parental controls. In the phone app you would connect with streaming services like Youtube kids, Hulu, Netflix, amazon, etc., allowing kids to browse their favorite content across their services on one app. This would allow parents to manage the controls without the stress of managing content settings across multiple apps.

Parents could set age controls and other existing algorithms into place and then be able to modify those algorithms. Parents woule select a series, channel or individual videos and have the app generate a montage with a specified duration of the content by randomly selecting clips, storing them locally, and then playing them in an edited sequence. Parents would be able to judge content more at a glance this way. Machine learning would be used to only compile clips with moving characters in them so that the clips would not be empty or irrelevant.

The app would have a community section with posted montages. Posted montages would drive discussions around content, giving visibility and focus to a large and changeable pool of children’s media that might not always be suitable for children.

In the on-boarding, you can connect with streaming services like Youtube kids, Hulu, Netflix, amazon, etc., allowing your child to browse their favorite content across their services once their device is synced.

Children can browse content from specific services or browse a mixture via filtering preferences. They can also send messages to their parents requesting new connections.

Parents can also gate content behind task completion quotas. Before the child can use their remaining screentime, they have to complete 5 math lessons.

In addition to connecting the app with streaming services, educational apps like Quizlet would also be available to connect in content settings.

On the home screen of the parent app, watch history is the first data served up. Diving into the video content in watch history, the parent could start moderating on the fly.

Below watch history are the tasks complete graphs displaying a child’s progress on assigned tasks. These are the same tasks used in the gating modals (shown on the previous page).

In the top right, the parent can switch children to view the same data for each child. Top left is the menu showing that there is an unread message or some other action item. In the bottom right on the footer nav, ‘community’ will take you to the community page where you can chat with other parents and view discussions around child content.

In the app menu you can navigate to each childs profile where you can effect individual settings. You can access messages from children or messages from the community. You can access your montages or start creating new ones. You can also access general settings or sign out.

The app generates a montage of defined clips (seen on the previous screen) by loading and storing video clips locally, hence the progress bar, until the montage is reviewed. This allows the video to play like one edited video clip during the review flow for best UX.

This is what it looks like to review a generated montage. The app uses machine learning to compile only scenes with dialog by looking for animated humanoid shapes.

In case that doesnt work and the parent is presented with a clip that has no dialog/nothing to rate, they can hit ‘skip’ to either disregard or regenerate the clip later from the clip feed (displayed on the next screen).

Parents can click the checkmark on the right to approve a clip, or the x on the left to reject a clip. The results will be displayed at the end of the montage, giving the parent an overall approval rating for a series or collection of content in the montage.

This is the montage feed compiling the overall clip rating score using ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ as the qualifying language. Parents can select each clip in the feed to rewatch or even create a new montage in order to produce refined moderation.

The montage can be posted to the community section of the app via the share icon in the score header.