ABC KIDS. Designed with Kids for Kids.

ABC KIDS app was losing market share. An aging app, fragmented experience and growing competition led to high drop-off rates as children transitioned from parent lead viewing to child lead viewing. Despite great content existing for all ages, an outdated, childish app left older children feeling as though the app was ‘for babies’, and would leave as soon as their parents allowed. Poor retention. Poor engagement. Broken trust. The brief: To connect Australian kids to Australian culture through a simple, streamlined, child-led app, which grows with children as they develop. Designed for all Australians - regardless of their location and abilities.

Together wecreated an app that was: Designed for all. Kids don’t want childish design. Cleaner UI and intuitive patterns ensured we didn’t exclude older kids while being simple to use for pre-language children. Grows with you. Every child develops at a different rate. Targeting content by age is impossible. We added collections curated by early childhood experts, so kids can find what’s right for them as they develop – while still allowing parents to set limits. More than just video. Kids don’t always want to sit and watch, so we expanded the offering to include follow-along craft tutorials and podcasts.

Since launch; New downloads are up 71% Unique monthly users are up 13% Discovery of content is up 8% Awarded Apple app of the day We delivered real change for kids, and the ABC. For kids. An app that’s never ‘for babies’ or ‘too grown up’. A simpler way to get to the content I love, and discover new things as my tastes change. For ABC as a whole. The new app re-affirmed their position as experts in kids entertainment – all while improving engagement, retention, and making it easier to transition audiences to other services as they age.

Together Mentally Friendly and ABC designed a process to safely and effectively co-design the new app with kids. With kids it’s critical to test rather than ask, so we created and frequently iterated on a beautiful, working, fully designed prototype using the live content feeds. Giving the children the opportunity to just use rather than having to pretend. Ultimately the solution was designed with boys, girls, ages 4 to 13, Siblings, only children, Metro, suburban, Aboriginal & Torres Strait islander, regional, ESL, and kids with a spectrum of learning disabilities. We tested with over a 1000 families in total. Resulting in an interface that respects kids as they grow adapting to their interests and needs not just their age. Kid-friendly content collections Themed show pages Text and visual search Parent controls - Session timers / show filter Animated intro and onboarding “The new ABC Kids app delivers on the promise we made at the Kick off- to expand our audience (0-8), to be child-led, to provide an experience to showcase our incredible content in the best way possible... Our new app with the new brand can stand next to our competitors, and shines brightly.” Mary-Claire Monsalve Senior Product Design Manager - Australian Broadcasting Corporation