Defining MVP
UpDownLeftRight is trying to change the way kids play and pay. By wearing the AB wristband, you can turn every type of play imaginable into activity points. You can then exchange these in games for more experience points, upgrades, and powers. Parents can also set up regular or one-off top-ups to give the young people the responsibility to manage their own purchases.
The problem.
The start-up was in early stages and needed the user needs and the MVP of their parents & children app defined.
The users.
Following internal user research, we identified 3 main user types, children (7-16-year-olds), parents of the children, and game developers.
After the initial stage of research, we decided to first focus on the children’s experience so we organized play workshops to explore their needs and wants, what barriers they might have, their current exposure to technology, but we also showed them the first prototype of the app to gage their use of it and first impressions.
It was interesting and fun to see that the children’s needs were very different than their parents. They wanted all the fun bits and their parents wanted the stats, the control, and the visibility of what their children are doing online. This was paramount in them enabling their children to use the arm band and the app on any device. It was quite challenging to define an MVP that works for both children and parents at the same time.
The outcome and learnings.
We found that children didn’t care about established navigation patterns, were very easily adaptable and thirsty to explore everything on the screen. Icons were very important, to the point of the labels were completely ignored, but rarely it impacted their comprehension.
Surprisingly, the older children were quite privacy conscious and not very comfortable being photographed or filmed even if just for the purpose of testing the app (with their parents’ written permission). They all like the slickness of touch screens on their phones and devices, but they know it’s not appropriate for them and would prefer something more sturdy. It was quite interesting at times for them to wonder what their parents would say about it (photographing, potentially smashing the screen, the visibility the parents would have on their activity).
Data is an interesting one. They know it’s important and tells them ‘things’, they contextualise it in more or less correct ways (“I want to know how fit and healthy I am, so I want to see my heart rate!”), but they are definitely looking for stats and loving them.
I also wrote a more in-depth blog post about my experience in usability testing with 11year olds on medium.
My recommendation for UpDownLeftRight was to focus on separating even more the user types into personas, especially per age groups as this proved a big factor in their behaviour. This should translate into a more personalised experience in the app for each user group.
Another recommendation was to focus on where the needs of the parents meet the children/young adults for MVP as they are the ones purchasing the product and supporting or not the use of it.
Oh, and maybe add a night torch feature?