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MACADEMIA / DA VINCI KIDS MOBILE APP
Da Vinci Kids is a global educational subscription service offering age-appropriate TV shows, documentaries and games for children. At the time, the product was available in 21 languages across more than 190 countries, reaching 60 million children and families.
I worked on a redesign of the mobile onboarding experience, using parent research to improve product understanding, introduce personalisation and create a clearer path towards subscription.
MY ROLE
Lead Designer and Researcher
SKILLS
User Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Interaction Design
01 / CONTEXT
Before a child could access Da Vinci Kids, a parent needed to understand the product, create an account, set up a child profile and choose a subscription plan.
The existing onboarding completed these functional tasks, but the experience felt dated and did little to communicate the value of the product before asking parents to register and begin a free trial.
The redesign also needed to align with a broader evolution of the Da Vinci Kids brand and visual direction.
02 / OPPORTUNITY
The opportunity was to rethink onboarding as more than a sequence of account creation screens.
We wanted to help parents:
Understand what their child would get from the product
Feel more confident starting a subscription
Personalise the experience around their child's interests
Move through account creation with less friction
The wider goal was to support improvements in onboarding completion and conversion while creating a stronger introduction to the product.
03 / ROLE
I worked across the onboarding redesign from research and early definition through to interaction design and implementation. My responsibilities included user research, information architecture, user flows, wireframing, prototyping, and UI design. I also worked closely with other members of the product team, including UI and visual design, product managers, and mobile developers.
04 / EVIDENCE
I conducted remote usability sessions with parents using the existing onboarding experience.
The research highlighted three recurring problems:
Parents struggled to understand what content and features they would find once inside the app.
The onboarding felt static and disconnected from the richer experience available within the product.
Parents understood that a seven-day free trial was available, but were less clear about when payment would begin and what committing to the trial involved.
There was also an opportunity to make profile creation more useful by learning about the child's interests during onboarding.
I synthesised the research through affinity mapping with members of the product team, grouping observations around product understanding, personalisation, account creation and payment.
This gave us four clear priorities:
Communicate product value earlier
Make onboarding more engaging
Introduce meaningful personalisation
Reduce uncertainty around subscription
05 / KEY DECISIONS
We added a short product carousel near the beginning of onboarding, showing real examples of games, shows and educational content.The trade-off was adding another step to the journey, so the content needed to communicate value quickly without becoming a barrier.
We expanded profile setup to capture the child's interests as well as their name and age, allowing onboarding data to inform the experience inside the app.
Rather than simply pushing the free-trial message harder, we made the subscription mechanics explicit, including when access started, when a reminder would be sent and when payment would begin.
06 / SOLUTION
The final experience brought product education, personalisation, account creation and subscription into a more coherent journey.
A redesigned welcome experience and onboarding carousel showed parents what was actually available inside Da Vinci Kids before asking them to commit.
Profile creation was expanded to include interests such as science, sport, nature and history, allowing content within the app to become more relevant to the individual child.
I redesigned password validation so requirements responded directly to user input, making it clearer what had been completed and what still needed attention. I worked with mobile engineering to refine the interaction and error states during implementation.
The redesigned payment screen introduced a simple timeline explaining the free trial:
Today: Access begins
Day 5: Reminder before the trial ends
Day 7: Paid subscription begins
Pricing, billing frequency and cancellation information were presented alongside it, giving parents clearer expectations before starting the trial.
07 / IMPACT
The redesigned onboarding addressed the main areas of friction identified through research and was taken from early concepts and wireframes through to a production-ready mobile experience.
It created a clearer introduction to the product, introduced personalisation into onboarding and made the subscription journey more transparent.
I no longer have reliable post-launch analytics from this project, so I would avoid attributing a specific conversion or completion uplift to the redesign.
08 / CONCLUSION
This was one of my earlier end-to-end product design projects and helped establish how I approach product problems today.
It gave me practical experience using research to identify friction, translating insights into design priorities and working closely with design and engineering to take an experience through to delivery.
Looking back, the biggest thing I would change is measurement. Today I would define funnel metrics upfront, analyse drop-off throughout onboarding and use experimentation to understand the impact of individual changes rather than evaluating the redesign as a single release.
Always happy to chat about interesting products, teams and opportunities.
hello@frosen.design
+44 7787 430321
London, United Kingdom