Moxie Robot Parent App
Key Insights into a Child’s Development
Meet Moxie, the world’s first emotional support robot for kids! This robot was developed by Embodied, whose mission is to build socially and emotionally intelligent animate companions with believable personality and empathy to enhance our daily lives.
Before Moxie could enter the global stage, a mobile app for parents was needed to allow parents to receive key insights into their child’s social, emotional, and life skills development. It also needed to track their child’s progress with Moxie and get suggested content with tips to enhance their child’s learning experience. Data security, ease of robot setup, and data visualization were top of mind when inventing the mobile app that parents use today.
Sphere of Influence
One key concern when creating the parent app was to maintain a private and trustworthy relationship between Moxie and the child. The app should allow parents to get status updates and engage with their child without coming between the peer-to-peer relationship established through the learning program.
This need for maintaining pure one-to-one relationships resulted in the sphere of influence model, where the apps’ infrastructure and design were planned to keep each relationship clear and distinct. The app UX focused exclusively on the parent while the robot focused on the child.
Security & Protecting PII
Security is paramount whenever you build a system that stores personal data, especially for children. The UX design was planned in partnership with technical designs to ensure that all data was stored properly and the UX of the app reinforced the promise of system security.
Sketching Dashboards
Beyond the essentials of pairing with the robot and securely storing data, a key experience within the parent app were the dashboards. The goal was to tell a story of a child’s progress without vanity metrics or graphs. The information displayed needed to be useful, actionable, and easy for a parent to digest quickly.
There were many iterations of these dashboards, completed in quick succession. These were reviewed with executives and the folks designing the learning programs. At this stage, little content had been produced, and it was a challenge to balance app design and API development without example lessons. These early design conversations helped spur content production and focused the content team on the key elements of what skill development would look like with Moxie.
A Perfect Pair
Moxie and the parent app launched in April 2020, just in time for parents who would need educational and emotional support for their children during the COVID-19 lockdown. The app-robot pairing (one of the tricker features to develop) worked like a charm, parents could easily stay up to date with their children, and in 2022 Moxie was the most-awarded AI product for the home!
