Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Paige

In today’s world, children grow up surrounded by technology, using tablets and phones as a source of entertainment from as young as 2/3. These kids are commonly known as ‘digital natives’.

I’m researching into how to design a product for children aged 9–12, and how to tailor the UX to suit them specifically. Research shows that we shouldn’t just stick everyone younger than 13 into one group, but rather split them into three groups based on their cognitive development.

By the time children reach age 9, they’re most likely already familiar with using apps and touchscreen devices. Compared to a 6 year old, they’ll be able to be more specific in their movements, able to recognise smaller CTA’s and touching smaller targets. By age 9, children have developed an advanced level of reading skills, meaning they’ll be able to scan through content and pick out the information they need. However — it’s important to remember that they mightn’t be able to distinguish between genuine content and advertisements.

Designing for Children

I came across an InVision blog post about designing for children, and pulled the following key points from the article:

According to Debra Gelman, author of Designing for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning, when you’re designing for adults — even when designing games for adults — the goal is to help them cross the finish line. But when you’re designing for children, the finish line is just a small part of the story.

There are four points to note:

Children love a challenge — this could be through the challenge of a game or resolving a conflict/overcoming a problem to reach the solution.
Children want feedback — on everything. Whether their action is right or wrong, children will rely on visual or auditory feedback to tell them so.
Children are more trusting than adults — they aren’t aware of the consequences of some actions. This means the designer needs to safeguard the product.
Kids develop faster than adults — the rate of their cognitive development means they need to be grouped into smaller age ranges.

Children and adults both expect design patterns to be consistent. Contrary to popular belief, kids don’t like it when everything on their screen does something ‘cool.’

Elements that get in the way or animate spontaneously or don’t contribute to the overall goal can frustrate kids, and cause them to abandon a game or an app entirely.

“In addition, if everything on the screen moves, is brightly colored, or makes noise on the same level, kids and adults become confused about what is interactive and what isn’t, and this makes it very hard for them to use the site or app.”

A common design principle for adults is to keep interactions and feedback consistent so that users will be able to learn how use the site or app quickly. The same is true for kids.

Navigation

Children will take icons in a literal sense. Whereas we adults would recognise the hamburger icon as being a menu, children wouldn’t understand what these lines mean. It’s important for designers to create icons which show exactly where the user will be taken when they select it, realistically we should over-simplify it.

A way to do this would be to use larger icons, and accompany them with text.

A few examples:

The Sesame Street website uses both a combination of icons and text, and icons for navigation. The main navigation is an icon and text, with the secondary nav simply containing icons of the characters — children will be able to understand that they are in the games menu, then choosing a character’s game.

Sesame Street website

The Peppa Pig website also uses icons and text for their navigation.

These websites are aimed at children younger than my target audience of 9–12, but when it comes to navigation, I need to design for the youngest user. In other words I need to over-simplify the navigation to ensure that every user can use it effectively.

Creating an effective design

We all know children like bright colours and animations to attract their attention, but I want to dive deeper and understand how to use these within an app.

A point from an article by InVision which I thought was interesting was to clear up the bottom of the screen, as kids will accidentally hit the bottom of the tablet screen which would in turn cause them to lose their place. A lot of apps use the bottom of the screen as a space for their main navigation, but in this case it could be more of a hinderance than convenience.

Source: https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/building-apps-for-children/

Another point which came up in a few articles is that children like to be surprised, in that they might receive an extra life in a game for completing a level or even a prize for using the app two days in a row. This is something I should take into consideration when I am designing my lesson plans. I need the kids to want to learn sign language, so surprising them alongside giving feedback will be a good way to do this. I’ll refer to my research on gamification to find more ways to do this.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Research: UX for Children’s Products was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Research: UX for Children’s Products

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