An AI buddy that turns "screen time" into "good time".

A kids app concept I shaped around two users at once. A child who wants a friend, and a parent who wants peace of mind.

Role

UX/UI Designer

Industry

Kids

Duration

4 months

Hi, I'm Buddy ✦

Overview

What the project was

Working parents wanted to feel less guilty about what their kids did with a device, but the alternatives were either too restrictive or too hands-off. Budiya looked for a third path. An AI buddy that the child actually wanted to hang out with, paired with quiet visibility for the parent that didn't feel like surveillance.

Approach

How I worked

Parent research

Talked to parents about screen-time guilt, the tug between control and trust, and what a good day looks like.

Safety review

Mapped data minimisation, consent layering, and content guardrails into the spec before any screen got designed.

Conversational UX

Designed Buddy's voice and patterns. Playful and warm, never preachy, never selling anything.

Prototype

Onboarding, the AI chat, the daily plan, and a parent dashboard. Clickable and walkthrough-ready.

Highlights

A friend for the kid.

Buddy greeting the child by name and asking how they feel

Buddy greets the child by name and asks how they feel, turning screen time into a conversation.

Why this way

I designed Buddy to lead with emotion, not content. The first thing it asks is how you feel, so the app feels like a friend checking in, not a feed waiting to autoplay.

A curated watch-and-play screen for the child

Watch and play, curated so the child explores without hitting anything inappropriate.

A window for the parent.

The parent's home: activity at a glance, profile setup, and per-child monitoring.

Per-child time-limit controls framed as care rather than control

Time limits the parent sets per child, framed as care, not control.

Why this way

The hardest part was making parental visibility feel like trust, not surveillance. I kept it to gentle limits and a calm activity view, never live tracking of the child.

Before the screens — the research foundation

Affinity map of the tension between parental control and a child's freedom

Affinity-mapping the tension between parental control and a child's freedom.

User stories distilled into How-Might-We prompts.

Three user scenarios (a parent, a child, and a lonely kid) mapped as wireflows, the source of the two-user structure.

Reflection

What I took away

Designing for kids isn't about adding cute. It's about building two products at the same time, one for the child and one for the parent, that quietly trust each other.

Next project

Behind Story, museum design research

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