LeapBand children’s fitness watch - Parent config & dashboard
Context
As a User Experience Designer on LeapFrog’s Digital Ecosystem Team, it was my responsibility to design onboarding experiences for LeapFrog’s range of connected digital educational devices for kids. These were designed to be easy and friction-free for parents and other family members to use, while supporting business-critical function of ensuring account creation within the company’s CRM system. That system was central to maintaining relationships with parents as their children developed and progressed through LeapFrog’s range of age-appropriate content, which was also tied to developmental goals.
Process
Bringing LeapFrog products to market was an intensely interdisciplinary effort involving the contributions of product marketers, industrial designers, child development experts, educational content creators, firmware engineers, supply chain experts, packaging designers, QA engineers, and the Ecosystem team. As a UX designer on the Ecosystem team we developed device onboarding experiences which would ensure easy account creation for new LeapFrog customers, or for existing LF customers, reliably linking their new devices to their existing accounts. Additionally, these onboarding experiences supported various levels of customization of the devices to best meet the needs of both the children and their parents. These customizations could entail personalizing the devices for the child (for example, learning the child’s name and favorite colors, foods, animals, etc), or allowing parents to tailor content to education goals for their child. This process also ensured that data about the child’s journey through educational content and goals could be captured from the devices, so that new developmentally appropriate content could continue to be sent to the device. For some devices, it also was how parents purchased content and loaded it onto the devices.
As these experiences were mission critical for the success of the devices in the marketplace, with significant consequences in Support costs if gotten wrong, we tested and iterated until they were polished, smooth and extremely reliable. We conducted Usability Tests in labs with actual grandparents and parents, first with paper prototypes early in the process, later with digital prototypes of the connect experiences, and finally with the actual pre-release software. This testing was instrumental in discovering all of the small details which might have tripped users up. Based on that invaluable feedback, these user experiences were revised and polished before these devices were on the shelves at toy and electronics stores.
Outcome
The LeapBand was released to great fanfare with a campaign featuring US National Women’s Soccer team’s all-time great Mia Hamm. Hundreds of thousands of devices were sold, customized and registered using this onboarding and configuration experience, with almost no resulting calls to LeapFrog’s Customer Support department.
