ABC Kids

Role

Senior Product Manager

Year

2020

ABC Kids, Australia's leading kids' app with over 1 million monthly viewers, faced a challenge. While boasting a great selection of content, the app was losing market share due to an ageing design, fragmented experience and growing competition. Younger viewers transitioned away as the app felt "childish," leading to high drop-off rates and poor engagement.

I led a cross-functional team tasked with redesigning, rebuilding, and relaunching the ABC Kids app for iOS and Android. The goal was to create a more engaging and user-friendly experience for children and their parents, that improved retention, increased market share and could support children as they developed.

Through Discovery I worked with a product designer to conduct extensive user research, involving interviews, surveys, and observations of children and parents using the existing app. This research helped us to identify key pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Based on the research findings, we developed a new vision for the app that focused on three key principles:

  • Design for all - Modern, clean UI and intuitive patterns that didn’t exclude older kids while still being simple to use for young kids.

  • Grows with you - Information architecture and content strategy that introduces age specific content to help kids find the right shows for them as they develop

  • Go beyond video - Expanding the content offering to help kids learn and grow and not just pass the time

The redesigned ABC Kids app was launched in 2019 to positive reviews from parents and children alike. The app resulted in a 13% increase in monthly active users (MAU) and a 71% increase in downloads in the first three months after launch.