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Designing a Feedback Channel for Kids

Company: Meta (Facebook)

Team: Messenger, Integrity

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Business problem

Messenger Kids has low user feedback volume and quality, which hinders the team’s ability to identify, investigate, and resolve user issues. Improving user feedback is crucial for the team to ship a high-quality product that users trust and love.

Solution

Build dedicated user feedback channels for the Messenger Kids app to make it easier for kids and parents to report technical issues, pain points, and other feedback.

Tools

  • Figma

  • Sketch

  • Framer

  • Zeplin

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Team

  • 1 product designer

  • 1 product manager

  • 4 developers

  • 1 data engineer

  • 1 UX researcher

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My role

  • UX/UI design

  • UX research

  • Content strategy

  • Product management

  • Product strategy

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Timeline

  • Overall: 10+ weeks

  • Discovery & research: 3+ weeks

  • Design & testing: 7 weeks

Understand & define

My design process

01

Understand & define

02

Ideate & align

03

Design

04

Test & iterate

05

Post-launch analysis

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User interviews

We conducted interviews with 6 kids (ages 8-11) to better understand kid comprehension of 'report a problem' and guide our approach to building this feedback channel.

All kids understood the difference between ‘report a person’ and ‘report a problem’. Additionally, some kids had prior experience reporting in apps like Roblox and Minecraft.

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Defining problem, solution, & goals

User problem

Kids are experiencing issues and kids want to report technical issues about the Messenger Kids app, however, there is no convenient way for them to do so.

Solution

To solve this problem, we need to make reporting issues easier for kids by building a user feedback channel in the Messenger Kids app for users to report technical issues.

Goal

Increase user feedback and volume and improve user feedback quality to make it easier for our product team to identify, investigate, and resolve top user issues.

Performance metrics

Number of user feedback reports, number of user and device logs associated with user feedback reports, time it takes to identify and resolve user issues.

Initial questions

Before diving into ideation and design I identified two key questions that needed answering to better understand the current user behavior and how to best solve this problem:

  1. Are kids able and willing to report technical issues?

  2. Why aren't kids reporting issues about Messenger Kids at the same rate as other apps?

Design considerations

This is a sensitive project that involves collection of kid data. With this in mind, before jumping into the designs, I started by meeting with all relevant product and non-product partners to understand constraints, other design considerations, and get an idea of what is and isn't possible...

Design constraints

  • Legal and privacy - limit data collection to only what is necessary and follow all regulations regarding data retention.

  • Limited resources - the Integrity team only has 2 engineers, so we need to utilize as much of the existing feedback channel infra and UI as much as possible.

Risk areas

  • Personal information - with free-form text feedback there is a risk that kids could submit personal information (i.e. phone number, address, etc.), which goes against kid data collection regulations.

  • Incorrect feedback channel - there is a chance that kids could submit 'report a person' reports through the 'report a problem' feedback channel.

Challenges

  • Kid-friendly design - Design with kid usability and comprehension in mind. All of the feedback channels across the Facebook Family of Apps are designed for Adults, so we need to rethink what can be improved to tailor to kid needs.

Design question

How might we build a kid-friendly, legally compliant in-app feedback channel that captures the quantity and quality of user feedback needed for our team to better resolve user issues?

Ideate & align

Competetive analysis

I conducted a competitive analysis to understand the prevalence of feedback channels in kids apps as well as any specific kid-friendly features.

Findings

Almost all kids apps built for slightly older kids from ages 9-13 had feedback channels, while apps for ages 6-9 had simpler UI / no feedback channel.

All feedback channels utilized free-form text, while some had multi-step flows that also contained selectable issue categories.

A small number of apps implemented parent gating with a code or challenge question to access the feedback channel, while most apps allowed kids to access the feature and report.

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Understand & define

Ideate

Align on design direction

Test, iterate, & finalize designs

Eng handoff & design QA

Post-launch analysis & iteration

Initial explorations

After identifying the main Constraints, Risk Areas, and Challenges, I began putting together explorations and identified 4 different directions that we could pursue for the reporting flow.

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User testing

We had external users evaluate and compare various reporting prototypes to gauge comfort, comprehension, and preference and provide us with directional insights for our final design. These were our findings:

  • Most kids expected to find ‘report a problem’ in the settings / profile page

  • The icons and naming conventions for the reporting channels could be improved to increase comprehension

  • The text-only option performed the best as selectable categories and multiple steps created confusion and friction

Choosing a design direction

Based on user research findings, the direction we chose to move forward with is the Free-Form Text Only feedback channel flow.

Design

Proposed design

After designing high-fidelity prototypes, aligning with product partners, and getting all of the necessary approvals, this is the design I proposed, ready to be tested with users...

Updating visual style

The visual style of the reporting surfaces was out-dated and didn't match the rest of the app. As a result, these experiences felt external to the app and out of place. To make these experiences feel more approachable, trustworthy, and native to the app, we updated both the report a person and report a problem visual styles to match the rest of the Messenger Kids app.

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Entry-point design

In the design of the entry-point I kept kid-comprehension and risk areas top of mind. To address these areas I made the following design decisions:

  • Single entry-point on the ‘Your Info’ page to limit chances of accidental reports and increase the quality of reports received

  • Added ‘Report a Person’ entry-point above ‘Something Isn’t Working’ to help ensure integrity reports go through correct channel

  • Worked with content to update naming conventions and icons to enhance comprehension & emphasize ‘Report a Person’

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Solution to address remaining risk areas

To address these risk areas, the team is considering a feature whereby the child’s reports are routed to their parent who reviews & determines whether or not their child’s report needs to be escalated to MK. This solution would...

  • Alleviate legal risk associated with reports containing personal information due to parental consent and submission of feedback

  • Allow parents to take action on integrity reports, greatly reducing the likelihood and danger of kids sending in reports via the wrong channel and mitigating legal risk due to parental consent and submission of feedback

  • Improve the quality of feedback and reduce noise, with parents taking action to resolve some issues their kids are having and not submitting irrelevant reports

Feedback input flow design

Similar to the design of the entry-point, I made sure to take into account the requirements gathered in the previous design stages, which is reflected in the following design decisions:

  • Worked with content to provide intuitive phrasing and add an example of what to report to aid kid comprehension

  • Added option to ‘Report a Person’ if kid wants to submit an integrity report

  • Provided a disclaimer in the free-form text area to tell users not submit personal information

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Post-launch analysis

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Test & iterate

Launch-ready experiment

We took various measures to address the risk areas associated with free-form text. However, before the full rollout, to ensure the safety of users, we decided to run an experiment to determine the efficacy of these measures to prevent integrity reports and personal information being reported through ‘Flytrap’.

Results

Although uncommon, we identified a handful of reports about sensitive issues or that contained personal info - we also saw a large number of off-topic reports.

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Weighing pros and cons of this solution

Pros

This solution ensures that we are building a long-term solution that avoids potential legal issues for the team and won't require any future fixes

Cons

The main drawbacks to this solution are that it would reduce feedback volume and require more engineering work.

Decision

Since the current state of user feedback is 0 for Messenger Kids, we decided that this feature is worth it to build as user feedback is a top priority for the team and vital for our ability to build a high-quality product that users love.

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Parent experience final design

Additionally, this is the final parental involvement experience that we landed on for parents to review their kids' reports about technical issues and decide whether to send to Facebook...

Kid experience final design

After design, experimentation, and iteration, this is the final design we landed on for the kid experience of submitting a report about a technical issue...

User research

We Launched an on-platform survey of parents, reporting on their expectations of the role of parents vs Messenger Kids in monitoring their child’s activity and their receptiveness to involvement in reviewing their child’s reports.

Key takeaway

Parents were very receptive to reviewing their child’s reports on first and deciding whether to escalate to Facebook.

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Moving forward

Opportunities for optimization

The drop-off in engagement at each stage is an opportunity to further increase the volume of user feedback we receive about Messenger Kids. For future improvements, we should understand why parents aren't engaging with the report at each stage of the pipeline, and implement solutions to address any shortcomings that the current feedback channel has.

Next steps

  • Add additional entry points in Facebook and Messenger for parents to get more accurate, specific, and segmented user feedback no matter where the issue is occurring. Getting app-specific feedback is extremely helpful in understanding the issue.

  • Potentially add a fork in the feedback button to send positive reports to app store review and issues and negative reports to the internal feedback channel.

User feedback data analysis

Analyzing and comparing app store reviews and review per user rates for Messenger and Messenger Kids, it is clear that users are experiencing issues and want to report them:

  • Messenger Kids’ app review per user rate is 23x Messenger

  • App reviews about technical issues are much more prevalent for Messenger Kids than for other Facebook Apps

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