Nick Jr.

Ask

Create an app experience for 2 to 6 year olds that is not only safe and friendly, but also simple and communicative enough for a non-literate child to master independently, on their own, without instruction from an adult.

Context & Process

With the rising popularity of low-cost digital tablets, Nickelodeon was seeing more and more children getting online on their own devices and using digital apps as their toys of choice. Nick Jr wanted to create a safe - and COPPA-compliant - place for these kids to play games and watch episodes on Android devices.

Our team knew, from research done on our existing platforms, that our preschool audience usually interacted with Nick Jr content on their own, independent from their parents. We also knew parents preferred this - they told us Nick Jr’s content was what they turned to when they had to make dinner or other chores and needed to keep their rambunctious preschooler occupied.

As a result, our first priority for this app was to make sure all the UI and UX patterns were understandable to our youngest users, so they could operate it with minimal parental intervention. This digital space needed to conform to the cognitive skills of these children, which could vary quite a bit over the age gap. For many, this was their first app. The design language needed to be natural and echo patterns they had seen in their world day-to-day.

I worked with our in-house research team to establish preschool-specific design guidelines for our team to follow in order to achieve this goal. Once the building begin, we did further user testing in-person with preschoolers to see what we might have missed (the expectations of such young digital natives are hard to guess!)

Results

Feedback from our parents let us know we hit our goal. Metrics-wise, Nick Jr is currently the #1 streamed brand in all of Viacom’s portfolio. We launched the Android app in September of 2016 - after 20 months on the market, the apps now stands at 4.2 stars on the Google Play store (8,375 ratings) and 4.2 stars in Amazon’s Store (820 ratings), with 1.4MM visits and 16MM content impressions per week.

This app was also the winner of the 2017 Cynopsis Kids Imagination Awards in the "Mobile App (Entertainment)" category.

Responsibilities

UX and UI design; copy, animation, and sound design in collaboration with the brand team. Worked in an agile environment in collaboration with PMO, Product, and Engineering to implement.