Baby's Brilliant

This is a "library" application for children from infant to kindergarten. Parents can download and create (along with their children) their own personalised library with entertaining content including songs, videos, and stories. In particular, the app gives options between six different types of content for downloading, which has been created by the app designers. These are: videos such as counting numbers, night lights that is, sounds that can help children sleep or relax, music such as concerts, books, interactive soundboards such as animal images which when pressed they produce animal sounds, and videos for the hearing impaired. Content is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese.

 

The sound and image quality of the content is very good. Some content is freely available while other needs to be purchased through the app. In the case of the latter, there is the option of a free preview of the content before purchasing. The quality of the content (images, videos and interactivity) is good, appropriate for young children and quite attractive. Videos present main functionality of stop, pause, forward and backward buttons and can be easily managed.

 

The app offers guidance as to what each item at the main menu does. This can be accessed the first time you interact with the app or at any time from the settings menu. This is a very useful feature as the app makes use of several images, rather than words, to compile the main menu. This facilitates understanding by young children and it is very appropriate for children who have not yet developed reading skills. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see a privacy policy option in the settings menu. The app declares that it may collect anonymous data yet, I could not read the entire policy to understand what this is about as the pop-up menu showed text up to the point of “Services Usage Information”. If any type of information is collected, then users should be informed and consent before they interact with the app. At the moment, this information is "hidden" under the settings menu and users may or may not come across it. In addition, while it is useful for users to see a downloading arrow when content is downloading, it would be beneficial if they could also see a progress bar showing for example, remaining time for downloading to finish.

 

Some technical issues/observations: I had to request a password reminder and I found the process cumbersome, specifically how to rename the given password. Also, the playlist button is not functioning well – when it is pressed from the top menu, a loading message appears and the app stops working. Similarly, when you press the respective icon under content, a pop-up window appears with no content and when pressed another window shows with Add play and Done buttons. None of the buttons seem to work and the app stops working (I had to close it and restart it). Another minor observation is that you cannot go back to the main menu by using the phone‟s back button – you need to press the cross from the top right side of the active content. After technical issues are resolved and the user experience is checked with children, Baby‟s brilliant could be a very nice app to use with your children to build content they are interested in and would like to interact with.