Verizon Family App | Professional Monitoring
24/7 Assist
Project summary
Verizon Family is a mobile app that helps parents monitor and manage their child’s online activity, calls, texts, and screen time. It includes safety features like Safe Walk and SOS, where family members can share their location and alert emergency contacts if they are feeling unsafe or experience an emergency. 24/7 Assist is an additional layer of assistance in an emergency. When triggered, a trained expert will help dispatch emergency services and provide updates to family members.
The challenge
Professional monitoring services were originally integrated with a Verizon product for the elderly and their carers called Care Smart. As part of a larger initiative to make Verizon Family a unified experience for families, this project would integrate professional monitoring, or 24/7 Assist into the Family app for all family members to use.
The first challenge was to understand the unique safety needs of different family members to ensure we could build a valuable and effective professional monitoring experience applicable to everyone.
Another challenge was to adapt and work with the third party agency providing the professional monitoring service to integrate their workflows into our existing safety features in a meaningful way.
Project goals
Provide safe and timely assistance and reassurance to family members in an emergency
Avoid further jeopardizing users through noisy alerts or calls during an emergency situation
Integrate third-party professional monitoring protocols seamlessly
Reach 20% adoption of the feature within 12 months
Contribute to an increase of Plus tier subscriptions of the Family app
My role
Senior product designer.
Working with a lead product designer.
Competitive research
Researched similar products and monitoring services to understand trends among competitors.
Stakeholder collaboration
Lead and participated in regular design reviews with engineers, designers and product managers to align on direction.
Content development
Worked with the content team to refine and develop content throughout the experience.
Ideation & design
Created user flows, high fidelity concepts and pixel perfect designs that align with Verizon’s design system.
Design QA
Conducted QA testing prior to release to identify bugs and design inconsistencies.
Results
Not great within one month of release.
Increased participant conversion and reduced drop rate in first month of release.
Process
Discovery
Going into this project the lead designer and I understood the objective was to pull professional monitoring services into the Verizon Family app to make the app a one-stop shop for all family safety features.
Before jumping into design it was necessary to go deeper in the discovery phase to understand the competitive landscape, who we were designing for, what value this feature could bring to specific family members and what technical or business constraints existed.
Competitive Analysis
To better understand the competitive landscape I looked at products that currently offered professional monitoring services.
I learned that this feature is mainly used for safety and emergency situations to assist people in the moment and help connect them with emergency services. Overall there was a broad application which included disaster response, emergency dispatch, medical assistance, home security and personal safety.
Third-party professional monitoring
The third-party provider of the professional monitoring service had several pre-existing workflows we would need to incorporate into our product. I analyzed these carefully and used them as a guide when building initial flow. It was important to understand what we could and couldn’t change before going into design.
Additionally, myself, lead designers and product team met with the lead designer for Care Smart, the existing professional monitoring Verizon service for elderly and their caregivers. We learned about limitations around features like fall detection due to native emergency features on iOS and android devices. Ultimately, Verizon professional monitoring features could be limited due to these existing native safety features, leaving Verizon’s professional monitoring as a secondary response via follow up phone call.
User personas
As I thought thought about how we might design professional monitoring for families, it was helpful to think through the needs of different family user personas. What types of emergencies might different family members encounter and in whihc contexts in which these might occur?
Parents/ adults
Kids
Elderly
Design
As I headed into design I began to hone in on more specific use cases. To align with the engineering and product team I created several flows to highlight questions I and the lead designer still had around feasibility. Initial designs and concepts helped us to map out specific scenarios in which different family members might use this feature and better align on the problems we’re solving with all stakeholders.
Mapping user flows
The first step in defining the professional monitoring experience was to map how the feature would work in specific scenarios.
For this exercise I thought about the different kinds of assistance someone might need in situations such as experiencing threatening events like a terrorist attack or active shooter, being attacked or mugged, dealing with a natural disaster or simply feeling unsafe.
It was immediately clear the kinds of help user would need in each scenario was very different. In some cases loud alerts would put the user in more danger by drawing attention to them, in others alerts may help rescuers find them.
Playing out these scenarios helped us to hone in on what events we could be most helpful in and focus in one these.
Concepts
We already had safety features such as Safe Walk and SOS, which helped connected users with emergency contacts when they felt unsafe or threatened. We had to work out how professional monitoring or 24/7 Assist would integrate with these features in an intuitive way.
I designed this feature to be visually distinct from other features in the app to better meet the needs of users experiencing an emergency. Text was minimal and large, I incorporated visuals to make information scannable. The UI was always in dark mode to avoid drawing attention to the user in threatening situations.
Getting aligned
Along the way maintaining alignment with a large product team was challenging. At times new stakeholders would come into the fold and introduce new thinking and perspective when we had already aligned on an experience. This made the project challenging at times but we were able to work though these changes by presenting our designs with alternatives, making sure to highlight what we believed was the optimal user experience.
At times we needed to compromise but were able to make what seemed like a less than optimal experience work as best it can for our users.
Pick up here
A phased approach
As the project moved along the launch was moved forward to help meet revenue goals. To launch early we focused on one specific user group, adults over 18, with the child experience to come later. This would mean we could launch and learn and refine as we rolled out to other user groups.
*24/7 Assist is available to Guardians and Members 18 years and older. Verizon Family Plus required.
**24/7 Assist is available to Guardians and Members 18 years and older. Verizon Family Plus required. 24/7 Assist is not a substitute for 911 and should not be used in a critical emergency.
MVP
A key part of the redesign was the introduction of transitions to help participants switch contexts between sections. Adding the right kind of animation was important. The goal was to help users along in the journey and add some delight along the way, without distracting them from the task at hand.
Usability testing
…
Further iteration
Viewing images & video
In the old experience, users were sent to external links to view files. This not only took participants out of the experience, but often left them with no clear way to navigate back to the survey. This lead to a high rate of drop-off. The product team, engineers and I brainstormed ways to display images within the survey experience and eventually landed on a simplified approach, where images and video could be viewed within the experience and referred back to easily in later associated questions. I worked on the user flows and interaction design to support this approach.
Key features
Upsell
Onboarding
Emergency flow
Results
The redesign lead to notable improvements in metrics with our audience sourcing partners. Specifically, a significant reduction in our drop rate and our highest rate of conversion to date. Since the release, we’ve gradually introduced new features and question types, building in time for usability testing, which was not possible during the initial release. We continued to see the payoff from this design investment many months later.
