Mother’s Day is almost here, and with it comes the necessary phone calls, gifts, and communication around showing appreciation for all of those hard working mommas out there.
I recently had a conversation with Matthew Bromberg, founder and CEO of I’mOK, an interesting app for parents and mothers. I’mOK aims to improve communication between children and parents and simply make parenting a bit easier by using gamification and positive feedback. I’mOK has been getting some attention recently from its announcement of raising $250,000 in seed and angel investments, but be sure to read the full interview and check out the I’mOK blog for more on tech and parenting.
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Matthew: We founded I’mOK this past winter, and we’ve been hard at work… It really came about from an inspiration, when it hit me that almost every parent in America–or really in the world–has had the following conversation with their kid:
Kid: “I want a cellphone”
Parent: “You’re too young”
Kid: “But I’m just going to use it to stay in touch with you”
And then there’s that moment where you want to be able to say, “OK”, because that is the best argument there is. You want to be able to say, “Ok, that’s great. Here’s the phone. How am I going to make that promise real?” I’mOK is really about finding a positive, kind of incentive based way of encouraging good communication between family members.
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Gamification Co: I love the idea, and when I first looked at it, I thought of the clock from “Harry Potter”. The one that gives the location and activity for every family member.
Matthew: It’s really true, but [I’mOK] was also very much a reaction against this idea that you can use technology to solve every problem. Clearly, you can track a kid 24/7 if you want to, but that is not actually–as a parent–it’s not really that useful. First of all, it is too much information. But also it creates a really negative feedback vibe. [On the other hand] turning staying in touch into a game… turns something from a negative spying vibe into something that is just fun for everybody.
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GCo: Getting into some of the design aspects you’ve used in the app, what sort of things have you seen that really work to get kids motivated to check-in with parents?
Matt: The way the application works is that we have something we call a “Wish List”, and kids make suggestions about what they want. They put things on their wish lists, and then when their parents log on to the app, the parents have a chance to reject, approve, or modify it. What has been really interesting about the idea is that even the rewards that get established are very much a part of the conversation. It’s not just the parents saying, “this is what I’m going to give you”. It’s everybody having a conversation and agreeing what you’re working for. Then you can earn points against whatever it is you want and whatever your parents have approved.
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GCo: Are those goals set by the parents, or is there a limited selection within the app?
Matt: When you log into the app, then the kid starts adding things to his or her Wish List. When the parent logs into the parent’s version of the app, they see those suggestions and they can suggest new ones or accept the ones the kids already proposed, or modify them. Wish List items are provisional until the parents sign off on them.
So far in testing, allowance and spending money have been the most popular, but right behind it are “softer” kinds of items, like “staying up late” or “computer time” or “a night out”. Those sorts of things are just below the monetary items in terms of popularity.
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GCo: Do you have any children yourself, and are you using the app with them?
Matt: I have an eleven year old and a nine year old… We are [using the app]. Each of us three founders has kids of various ages, so [our kids] were definitely the first Guinea pigs.
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GCo: Were there any interesting stories that have come about in your own personal use of the app?
Matt: It was funny. When we had the first version of the app, my son made a comment, which I felt was just super-smart. My eleven-year-old said, “You know, you don’t have to try to make it that fun. I am having a good time using it, but I’m using it because you told me to.” In a way, he was saying, “Don’t pander to me by trying to make it a game I would play without you asking me to do it.” It’s fun enough, so don’t bend over backwards and don’t try to make it too fun.
From a game design perspective, it was interesting.
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GCo: Well, when parents try to make something “cool” it generally back-fires, right?
Matt: Yeah. Exactly. It is the worst thing you can try to do, to try to pander to kids. It’s OK. We are asking them to use it as a condition for having the phone, and that is OK. But it does not have to go crazy with bells and whistles.
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GCo: Have you seen any criticism of the product?
Matt: Definitely, and that is the best part of the testing process. In some ways, the negative stuff is more useful than the positive stuff. There is a resistance amongst some parents, especially when they first hear the idea, some people feel like the don’t want to be rewarding their kids for something the kids should be doing anyway. I think that people’s minds go straight to the monetary rewards, and sometime it takes a little while to get them to figure out that there are all sorts of incentives you can do. Money is one of them, and if you want to use that, it is fine, but there are a bunch of softer ways to do it for folks who don’t want to feel too mercenary.
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GCo: What sort of things have you used to make it more about communication and less about the incentives?
Matt: It was that piece of communication that helped us figure out what the right process was in terms of adding wish list items from kids, and making that something where both the parent could suggest and the parent had to approve or modify. Every parent raises their kid differently, so they need freedom in the system. You have to create the outlines of the system, but you also have to let the parents be in control of filling in those outlines. Everybody is comfortable with their own approach and they don’t want to feel like you are putting them in a box.
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GCo: A lot of the gamification projects we’ve taken part in or reported on have included incentives created by a company, and that often creates a point of friction. People end up concentrating more on the incentives then what the company wants to encourage. But what you’ve done by having the incentives be part of the communication, to set these goals, it becomes more of a goal rather than an incentive.
Matt: That’s right, and it is interesting. Sometimes people say, “Look. I don’t want to incentivize my kids to do things. I just want them to do them.” But what you realize pretty quickly as a parent, is there are only two ways of getting at that: you can incentivize kids or you can punish them. That is all you’ve got: the positive and the negative. It was our belief going into this that the positive is better, and you don’t even have to get to the negative.
For us really, the most important thing is using a game to help everybody develop good communication habits. People think that technology makes their kids safe. It’s not. What makes kids and everybody safer is good communication. You are never going to know anything that your kid doesn’t want you to know, so the real trick to parenting is how do you create a positive back and forth, a positive way of communicating. I really wanted to find a way to use the mobile device to make parenting not only easier, but better, because so much about the mobile device is negative. You don’t want them to use it too much, and parents have a very mixed feeling about Facebook. They want the system private and secure because that makes their lives easier, and that is what we tried to do.
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