Smartphones and tablets are incredible for a wide range of use cases. But every time I use a device or app intentionally designed for one purpose, and designed well, I feel a difference. I hadn't been able to put into words until recently.
When my daughter first took to her Yoto, or put down Pok Pok without a meltdown, or when the whole family ended up playing hungry hippos on the Nex Playground at a family gathering — those moments stuck with me. The best experiences seemed to follow from a device or app designed to deliver in a specific situation.
General-purpose devices like phones and tablets are incredible, but they put a lot of design work back on parents. You have to set them up right, manage the controls, decide what's allowed and when, and stay on top of it as your kids get older. Ash Brandin, author of Power On: Managing Screen Time To Benefit The Whole Family, and who I interviewed here, frames it as three things you're actually managing: access to screens, behavior around screens, and content on the screen. Intentionally designed devices and apps don't eliminate that work, but they reduce it. Someone else already thought hard about the situation you're in.
This really crystallized for me after talking with Nichole Rouillac. She's the CEO of level an industrial design studio with clients like Microsoft, Logitech, Tempo and Nex, a mom, and a self-described "power user" of kids tech. She has a 12-year-old and a four-year-old and has been thinking about this stuff for years, from a different vantage point than most parents.
Nichole and I got in touch when I went looking for the designers of the Nex Playground after I reviewed it. Then we traded notes on the fun of families playing together and jumping around, and she offered to share some broader perspective.
See the full interview here or listen to it on any podcast app.
The power of technology
Nichole's older daughter is neurodivergent and dyslexic. Reading was hard for her, but she's now an avid reader who loves books.
Nichole believes the key was getting her daughter on audiobooks early with a Yoto player and using Osmo to make letter practice physical. "I think without the tech and also the teachers and the collaboration that we had with that, I don't know how we would have gotten her to love reading as much as she does."
I hadn't heard of Osmo before this conversation. It's a mirror that clips to an iPad and reads the surface below it. You play with physical letter tiles and the screen responds.
Nichole used it when her daughter was struggling with reading and writing. "I love the fusion when there's physical toys that you're playing with, but also in combination with technology. When you're actually playing with letters in physical space and then using those to spell, she actually enjoyed learning to read and learning her letters."
Phones and tablets require you to design
Something Nichole said stuck with me: "As soon as they see [the phone] out there, that glowing thing, they want that glowing thing that's in mom's hand. From a very young age, they just get drawn to it. So I keep it away as much as I can."
Every time I pull out my phone, I've created the potential for something great or the potential for one of my kids to get pulled into another direction, toward a distraction or a potentially isolating experience. To avoid this, we have to design some combination of situation and options, which is hard to do consistently. It's almost a relief to find apps and devices that are already designed right for the situation.
The Tonie Box does this for Nichole's youngest. Her four-year-old and her best friend swap characters and change what's playing on their own. No phone involved.
Her older daughter uses the Yoto. Same general category, different design, different age. "She doesn't have to ask me to change the music or the story on my phone. We don't need my phone to do any of that."
Two kids, two stages, two different devices built for where each kid actually is. Nichole didn't land there by accident — and it's something most of the screen time conversation skips entirely. It’s often just “screens” or “no screens”. “Phone” or “no phone” and a;; tech is almost lumped together.
On parental controls and device management
"Use Screen Time" on iOS is reasonable advice. Based on conversations with other parents, it also seems incomplete.
A recent Sesame Street Workshop/Joan Ganz Cooney Center report describes something they call "the family tech cycle" — the idea that families experience technology as an ongoing system, not a single decision. One key finding: parents are absorbing a lot of cognitive and emotional labor that better product design could reduce.
Getting controls right takes real effort. You have to know the device, know the settings, stay on top of it when things change. Nichole does this constantly. "Some of the controls are a little confusing and difficult to figure out," she said. She's also a designer and an early adopter with extensive experience — and she still tinkers. There's also a pull toward simplicity. One device is easier to manage than five. That logic makes sense until it means everything runs through the phone.
There are exceptions to this "designed for one purpose" framing. Nichole's daughter has an Apple Watch — a much more general-purpose device. Her daughter takes SF’s Muni transit home from school alone and can pick up milk and go to the library. Nichole can see where she is, her daughter can call if she needs to. The watch makes that independence possible without opening up social media. But in this case Nichole has taken on the design work herself, configuring a general-purpose device carefully for a specific purpose. It's a great illustration of how it can work, but it takes effort.
Other noteworthy themes from the conversation
Nichole lets her 12-year-old on Roblox and Minecraft with classmates after school, not reluctantly but deliberately. "I don't want her separated from her other classmates because she's not able to socialize." For older kids, some screen time is social participation. The question shifts from how much to what kind and with whom.
Her daughter also codes, writes her own video games, recently won a coding competition. Nichole gives her screen time partly for that. Technology as creative output, not just consumption.
There's also a pattern Nichole described that I’ve written about before: her daughter watches videos to learn things — balloon animals, cooking recipes, crafts — and then goes and makes them. "By the end of the weekend I think we had like 30 or 40 different balloon animals scattered around the house." The screen as a starting point, not the destination.
On the four-year-old end of things: they’re obsessed with Peppa Pig. Nichole: "At bedtime, I'm like, can we just please read something besides Peppa?" Kids go deep on characters and that's fine. Nichole mentions that Tonie is actually good for this — the fixation also offers a form of independence as it’s easy to swap the characters.
And the whole family plays bowling on the Nex Playground together. Four-year-old included. Author Ash Brandin said it well in a previous episode: "Leisure is important. You don't have to learn something. You don't have to improve yourself. You can just have leisure."
Community as a tool for discovery
Nichole mentioned that parents at some schools are signing petitions to delay smartphones, and there are new phones out there too. The Tin Can phone — an internet-connected device that looks like a retro landline — apparently sold out this past holiday season partly because of a desire to keep connection, but avoid the smartphone. Nichole got one for her daughter.
Nichole also suggested something I’ve heard before: find parents whose kids are a few years older than yours and ask them what they'd do differently. Not to copy them. Just to get a sense of what's coming before it arrives. And to this point: I just ordered an Osmo, because I can’t turn down a good recommendation and Nichole was so emphatic about it.
One other way I'm thinking about community: find companies and people with values that seem aligned with yours, and put some trust in the intentionality of their efforts. With well-designed products, you can usually feel the values in the design itself. The monocle on the Nex Playground — the little magnetic camera cover — exists because someone cared about privacy and refused to let it be an afterthought. The shape evokes a Rubik’s cube because it’s supposed to feel like play. And, once you start noticing which things are designed with care, it’s hard to stop.
