Designing with age-appropriate access control.

Designers should tailor smart home products to children's specific age and interaction levels, enabling parental control and autonomy for safety and privacy.

About this paper

The author analyzed marketing materials of 102 smart home products and found a significant lack of information on child safety and data privacy features.

Despite marketing efforts depicting children as users, there is a misalignment between these portrayals and the actual product features designed for children’s safety and privacy.

Here are some methods used in this study:

Content Analysis Inductive and Deductive Coding

Which part of the paper did the design guideline come from?

“Parental controls are technical solutions to help parents manage children's online activities and protect children from risks and harms [123]. We found that only a few smart home products (mostly smart displays and speakers) from three vendors (Apple, Google, and Amazon) provided parental control features for restricting children's media content access and screen time. Importantly, no provided parental control appeared to specifically target the smart home context, e.g., supporting parents in (...)” (Section 5.2: RQ2 Findings)

Sun, K., Li, J., Zou, Y., Radesky, J., Brooks, C., & Schaub, F. (2024). Unfulfilled Promises of Child Safety and Privacy: Portrayals and Use of Children in Smart Home Marketing. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8(CSCW1), 1–29.

Inspiration and scope

In this paper, the authors studied children’s characteristics across ages to design smart home products for their safety, privacy, access, and control needs.

You are designing for parents and kids by developing a mobile app with profiles based on age and role. Your design and the paper's context both stress secure access and control, ensuring children’s safety and privacy similar to your app securing family interactions.

Also, both contexts must consider educating and guiding users. Kids need instructions for smart home products, while your app should provide guidance to family members for effective feature use.

Leveraging these similarities, consider customizable access controls and distinct interaction modes for children in your app. This ensures safe, age-appropriate autonomy and effective app use by all family members.

Your input

What: Mobile application for family members
Who: Parents, kids
Design stage: Research, Ideation

Understanding users

The following user needs and pain points may apply to your design target as well:

Secure Authentication and Access Control

Implementing age-appropriate and user-friendly authentication mechanisms ensures that family members, including children, can safely interact with the application. Features like parental controls can provide necessary restrictions and oversight for secure use.

User Guidance and Education

Providing clear, step-by-step guidelines and help features can cater to both younger and older family members who need distinct levels of guidance to use various application features effectively.

Design ideas

Consider the following components for your design:

Implement age-specific themes and icons within each family member profile.

Develop a parent dashboard with granular access control features.

Incorporate short, interactive tutorials for app navigation tailored to different age groups.

Methods for you

Consider the following method(s) used in this paper for your design work:

Content Analysis

Using content analysis can help understand existing marketing portrayals of family and suggest what resonates with the target users. Designers should ensure to capture true-to-life insights reflective of parents' and kids' lived experiences.

Inductive and Deductive Coding

Coding the collected data allows the identification of themes relevant to family interactions with technology. Designers should categorize user feedback into meaningful themes that could guide ideation sessions aimed at addressing family needs.

[Figure 5] From this figure, you can see contextual examples of how young children interact with environment-adapting smart home products, inspiring ideas for making family-centric mobile applications.