Designing Whatsapp for Children

 

Clarifying Questions and Assumptions

• Age group of children : Under 13

• Any specific purpose? Normal commute with their friends, teachers and parents if away

• Do we need to design a complete new app or we can have an add on feature on an existing whatsapp application?  We can Decide : Ad on feature instead of different app.

 

What is the product?

• Simple messaging app that can be used by children without any concern

Why do they need it?

• To communicate with their friends , family and teachers

Who are the users?

• Children between age 8 and 13 and their parents

 

How do they use it?

•  They can access it from their parent’s smartphone or on their personal device .

 

User Needs : As a Child

• To communicate with their school friends to discuss about the school, sport and study

• To communicate with their teachers

• To communicate with their parents, siblings and relatives.

• If parents are working and children want to ask about anything at home.

• Some children might struggle interpreting their saying in whatsapp.

• Voice messages if they find typing hard

 

User Needs : As a parent

• Today’s kids are becoming multitasking, they are doing ton different things in a day, like going to school, going to tuition, Going to dance class/ sports class/ different activities

• It is a challenge for a parent to keep track of them everywhere especially if both the parents are working, that’s why sometimes parents give a phone to their children at very early age to understand their status.

• To keep track of children activities on whatsapp

• To give them a limited whatsapp access

• To do not let their children use whatsapp / social media for longer time

• To monitor child’s chat

• To communicate with child’s teacher in a group with child

 

Prioritized needs 

• Normal chat to communicate with friends, teachers, and family.

• Chat Monitoring and tracking feature for parents.

• Feature to limit the use of whatsapp for child

• Only chat important to child will be shown

• Some children might struggle interpreting their saying in whatsapp.

 

Listing out solutions (Impact vs Effort)

• Add on whatsapp for child feature   (H || H)

• One click children mode activation feature  (H || L)

• Even if a child and parent are using whatsapp on different phones, it should be registered under the same number. (H || L)

• In child Mode only chat and contacts preselected by a parent for a child will be shown.(H|| L)

• Child’s whatsapp usage can be monitored and limited by the parent’s phone under the parental control feature. (H || L)

• Parent’s can create focus groups with children and teachers to track his progress. (L || H)

• Bigger Microphone Icon ( L || HL)

• Easy AI powered suggestion messages prompt a child based on type of chat and opposite person so that he can select a message he wants to send without typing it completely and interpret his saying to another person. ( H || H)

• Simple Child friendly interface in child mode (H || L )

 

Metric to track

• Activation – No. of onboarded users in a month

• No. of AI powered Message prompt used by child per session and its demographics like age to understand usage

An interesting product design interview question for PM candidates.

So the way I want to think about designing such a product for children is to:

1. Ground myself in what the mission of Whatsapp is since everything we do has to align to the product’s mission and ultimately company mission.

2. Would like to better understand what children could mean here and why.

3. I would then want to see what we are trying to achieve

4. Different stakeholders and user segements, their pain points and how I might go about solving a prioritized pain point before reaching an MVP.

Mission of whatsapp is : to connect the world privately by designing a product that’s simple and private.

And ultimately Meta’s mission is to connect people to gether and thereby build a commmunity and make people feel closer together. This is especially applicable post-COVID and during hightened cases spikes and closures of borders, etc.

Why we may want to consider building such a product for children is because I think children are in their prime years of development and building social skills and enabling them to have a platform to do so is super important for their health and well being. Children are at risk from COVID more so than young adults and so I know my friends wouldn’t let kids get out of house. It took a toll on my neice and given she wasn’t allowed to text she curtailed her socail life. As a company, we care about adding value to users and I think children are a perfect age to build something for to add value for a long term for them.

Chilrdren here I asume would be 13 and above since permitting them access to texting tools earlier than that poses considerable risk to our users and ultimately may lead to legal issues for company.

Since this is a new product for children, we might want to be focused on Adoption but honestly adoptionn doest do any good if our users don’t find product valuable since they won’t use them, we will churn them. But focusing on Engagmenet claerly tells us we are adding value which ultimately leads to Retention (leading indicator of prodduct market fit) which then leads to Referral and Adoption through Awareness.

Stakeholders:

1. Children

2. Parents

3. Whatsapp

4. FB

Not considering advertisers since they distract the value of this product.

Parents have to be considered since they are the true customers. But ultimately, if a child doens’t gain value Parent is not going to push for their kids to use it for this type of product. So let’s focus on children.

Children segmentation:

Prioritization criteria: Biggest TAM, Highest alignment to BO

1. Special needs (some may have learning disability or blindness or deafness and those all have very different needs) – (Small TAM, Small Engagement)

2. Kids undergoing mental stress (let’s say due to migration from Ukrain). They mainly need ton of mental support and are also going through seperation issue from their dads and need hightened social network to make them feel loved and safe. (H need but temporary)

3. Children who are very social and not undergoing any specific above laid out risks / circumstances. (high need, high engagement)

4. Children who are introverts and not so social. (low need, low engagement)

Pain-points:

(Frequency, SEveirty, Alignment /w BO)

1. App isn’t as much fun to use (H, H, H)

2. Texting on the app is too boring (M, L, L)

3. There are too many messages on wahtsap and I don’t have enough time to go through them. (L, L, H)

Solutions:

Prioritization criteria: Value add, Effort of implementation, Feasibility, Alignment w/ BO

 1. Fun / Creative dance move video ideas for kids to immitate and share with friends on whatsapp. (H, L, H, H) –– low effort since this might be achieved with API integration with some solution out there. Maybe we can curate list of fun videos by integrating with Instagram. That will evne keep Instagram product healthy.

2. Ideas on what to collaborately create (maybe art work together) with their friends using Whatsapp. (M, M, H, H)

3. Virtual spaces for friends to hangout together and explore (friends get to choose national parks to go scavanger hunts on) – (H, H, H, H)

From implemenattion complexity matrix perspective #1 solution should be the MVP. However, kids may find this to get boring over course of time since everyone is going to end up over doing it so we may need tto think of imnplementing gamification or something to keep kids interested. Maybe we even need to implement max # of times a week one can engage with it. The goal is to keep children interested inn the Whatsapp product overall through the use of features. Maybe such a feature magically appears for short period and users never know when it ‘s going to come back so they will always use Whatsapp in a hope to find these exciting features.

Wrap up.