Trend Micro Online Guardian for Families
Trend Micro™ Online Guardian for Families helps you protect your children against Internet dangers, including cyberbullying and online predators. It lets you monitor your kids’ Internet activity 24x7 from anywhere and take action to keep them safe.
Think Different
Almost all of the best parental control software out there are able to monitor children's activities through use of Windows Accounts. The problem is, only less than 30% of parents have actually heard of Windows Account and this also makes setting up on multiple machines a pain. I was determined to change that.
By moving the entire monitoring rules and profiles to the cloud we are able to keep Online Guardian's install file size to a minimal. Setup once for all the kids and the agents will automatically sync with the cloud. No matter which kid or on which computer, the parents will have a clear and centralized report for all their activities.
Not Just Better, but the Best
Not only did we design Online Guardian to be simple for the parents we also made sure it is the easiest to setup and maintain compared to competitors. Start online, setup a profile for each kid, and download the agent to sync. See Online Guardian's setup process compared to others:
Another major innovation Trend Micro Online Guardian pioneered was on scheduling controls. When every service on the market utilized a complex grid of 7 days a week by 24 hours, I knew there must be a more efficient way.
Through studying children's behavior and understanding how parents work their schedule around the kids, I drew from my video editing experiences and designed the interactive time slider. By grouping schedule into Weekdays and Weekends it worked for most parents and just made sense. Parents can still refine each day if they need to, or simply set a maximum hour since kids' schedules are always ever-changing.
Designing Around the Globe
The Online Guardian team consist of PM and marketing in California, human interface engineering team in Taiwan, and development team both in Taiwan and Japan. It was a global effort managing and working with different time zones, cultures, and needs. A lot of designs actually happened on-the-fly as the entire team discusses feasibility and effort risks during "design camps". I can't count the times I've presented directly to the marketing VP and other stakeholders to resolve the issues that arise throughout the development.
Design, Validate, and Reiterate
With rigorous internal testing, user studies, and working closely with visual and front-end developers the end product is modern, clean, and ease to use. Concise reports, email alerts, and all the tools centralized in a dashboard for the parents to monitor and protect their children.
Assuring messages are provided for the kids when the rules aren't in their favor.
Pop-up Notification for Kids Due to Rules Set by Parents
Role
• Lead UX / Visual Designer • Prototyper • Researcher