Shivani Prakash Gupta

IT Integrated DesignInteraction DesignShivani Prakash Gupta

Gamification of Microsoft Family Safety

Shivani Prakash Gupta

M.Des.

Ms. Mamata N Rao

Microsoft India Development Centre

Microsoft Family Safety empowers families to create healthy habits and protects them with digital and physical safety features. Today, the product provides capabilities that allow families to control screen time restrictions, filter contents, control spending, impose restrictions on gaming and track physical location. These capabilities are available across various devices like Xbox, Windows PC, and Android & iOS.

However, today, it’s a complicated process for parents and kids to perform all necessary actions on the product and to be able to utilize the benefits provided by the product. Even though parents and kids both understand the benefits of using such a product, the lack of motivation and delight that drives users to perform necessary actions still exists.

Relook at the existing Family safety application to make it inclusive, engaging, and fun for all family members, including kids, thereby gamifying the overall experience to empower them to engage with the system more.

The aim is to inquire about the various ways a user can be motivated to engage with the product using methods of gamification and identify as many potential user jobs in the Family Safety product that can be driven for increased engagement using gamification.
It also involved proposing Design solutions that augment existing features of Family Safety with various aspects of gamification to drive user engagement and encourage desired behavior.

The outcome was a gamified solution composed of game mechanics and rewards measured against the Octalysis framework. The final concept was an amalgamation of Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, containing an underlying story to encourage kids to empathize with the character, thereby staying motivated to achieve their goals set by the parents.

The elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett and the 5 principles of Visual Design are applied to make the overall experience usable, functional, and delightful.

Design for Children, Gamification, Interaction Design, UX Design, Visual Design

Shivani Prakash Gupta
Shivani Prakash Gupta
Shivani Prakash Gupta