Safe Vision app had a spike in the number of downloads on Christmas:

2,456 people installed the app and signed up for an account on the week starting December 24! My theory is that many parents buy cheap Amazon Fire tablets as Christmas present for their kids. Then they discover that official YouTube Kids app is actually not available on Amazon App Store. So they start searching for alternatives and Safe Vision is one of the apps that they try. I changed the app to ask parents to select some popular YouTube channels instead of child’s interests during setup:

I also added a button to browse all unlocked channels to the Home screen:

This helped with activation rate a little bit, I believe:

Activation rate is about 29% now. This means that 70% of people that install the app never start using it. I conducted 4 user testing sessions (1 with my colleague and 3 on usertesting.com website). Results unambiguously indicate that the first time user experience is confusing and leaves many parents stuck. Here are answers to the question “What aspect of the app confused you?” by participants:

• not being able to figure out how to return to the page where you select your child’s age range.
• watch list did not seem to work and I could not find out how to block specific channels even though those channels had not been added to the white list.
• there wasn’t a password to prevent the adding of inappropriate videos

I have read “The Elements of User Onboarding” book by Samuel Hulick – it’s a great book, I’m going to improve the initial setup flow based on it.