Google kicked off an initiative to make the web and its products a better experience for kids 13 and under. Although this effort entailed lot of creative ideas around a more delightful suite of fun-for-kids products, it also meant that we would have to do a lot of work making sure the experience for parents would support these grand ideas. This project would serve as the infrastructure to make these kid-friendly products possible. The explorations below outline a few of the many iterations I made for an app tentatively titled "Parent Central" -- where you could generate accounts for your kids, manage requests, and set limits (e.g. bedtime and app-timers).

Although this project didn't launch while I was at Google, they successfully launched it in Q1, 2017. You can Read all about it, here.

One of the selling points was your ability, as a parent, to "stay in the know" about your kids online activity. We came up with a handful of ideas around what information would be useful without being invasive, like: knowing how much your kid spent on the app store, how many hours watching YouTube, or when contact was made with someone new.

Most of these explorations make some wild assumptions around privacy, but allowed us to gain valuable insights through user testing to help define the final product. Some of the more well-received features gravitated around parent's ability to set limits, like a bedtime, and manage their kid's spending on apps through a family inbox (below).