Designing content for Google’s new parental control
Problem
Children on Android can send and receive calls & texts from anyone. Parents have asked for more control over who can communicate with their children.
My role in addressing it:
As the Lead Content Designer for this project, I was responsible for
Strategizing content with UXD & Legal to ensure limitations are adequately communicated, including product nomenclature
Reviewing or drafting content with 5 partner teams to ensure a cohesive experience across the Google ecosystem
Presenting UX reviews to leadership with UXD and iterating the designs and content according to feedback
Coordinating research with UXR and Legal to ensure comprehension of all text, including legal disclosures
Preparing for translation & localization by annotating final strings, adding accessibility labels, and guidelines for translators
Parent-managed contacts
Now parents can limit who can contact their child
Working with UXR, UXD, and PM, I designed an in-app setup flow for parents to add important contacts to their child’s watch, and determine the best guardrails around who can communicate with them.
After the parent adds their information, they enter a steady state, where they can update the parental control setting and manage the child’s parent-managed contact list.
Changes that the parent makes to this list automatically apply to the contacts on the child’s devices.
Children can request new contacts remotely
Working across many product pillars, I wrote a flow in which children with smart watches can remotely request parent permission to call and text new numbers. Children can’t see or send texts until their parent approves the number. These strings were later re-applied for phones.
Parents can review requests in Family Link
This included designing content for parent-facing notifications and their in-app review flow. Approving the request adds the number to the child’s parent-managed contact list.
Children & parents can review contacts together
When the scope of this project expanded to include phones, I worked with designers on the Contacts and Messages teams to align the content design across device types. This included an in-person request flow in which the parent reviews on the child’s phone.
“Through it all, [Caylee] brought a calm clarity and patient understanding and comprehensive UXW knowledge as we navigated the Messages integration and mysterious project gaps. It was a pleasure working with [her] and learning about Family Link.”
— Senior UX Writer, Google Messages
Legal challenges
Shortly into strategizing content for this project, we learn that the FTC is pursuing Meta for inaccurately explaining the scope and limitations of their version of this parental control. To address this, I:
Created a screen outlining limitations of the parental control while working closely with 3 UXDs and 2 Legal counsel
Collaborated with UXR to scope user comprehension testing in order to ensure the content was understood
Research returned with high comprehension, ensuring that the legal requirements were addressed.
Adapting content for group chats
Challenge:
To protect children from group chats with numbers that their parent blocked or has yet to approve, we designed a bulk request behavior which would require parents to approve all or none of the unsaved numbers in the group chat. However, engineers didn’t build to distinguish this experience from the single number requests.
How I addressed it:
Worked with Engineers to conditionalize language in the single number request flow for group chats, explaining to parents that the behavior is different and why
Connected with UXR to examine the comprehension of the behavior change, and any possible confusion
Child-facing request flow
Parent-facing approval flow
Child's update“She thinks holistically about the design and how content shapes it. While building her UX point of view, she considers the opinions and concerns of stakeholder teams, including engineers, product managers, and legal counsel. She then works closely with designers and researchers like myself to craft the product; this includes ongoing conversations regarding what to communicate, how the product looks, and how we test the overall experience with users. What I appreciate most about working with Caylee is that I can involve her in every step of the design process and she will always offer ideas that move us closer to our final solution.”
— Senior UX Designer, Google Kids & Families
Cross-functional partners
Kids & Families
Messages
Android
WearOS
Contacts
Samsung
This parental control is set to launch in 2025, and projected to reach millions of parents and children globally