Designing for Kids : 1. Interaction Design
Over the years I’ve been involved in a few projects designing websites and e-learning materials for children, so I thought I’d share some of my notes on some of the issues relating to designing successful websites for kids. Most web design guidelines focus on the production websites for ‘average’ web users. However, designing web-based materials for children requires a slightly different approach. Our general intuition tells us that children are much more likely than adults to prefer brightly coloured, interactive, fun objects. While this reasoning can be extended to the design of web interfaces, many principles of interface design are based on human perceptual abilities and therefore apply to all individuals, regardless of their age. Thus, designing for children is more of a subtle art than might been expected, and involves assessing how to merge ‘conventional’ usability guidelines with child-specific guidelines.
It must (as always) be stressed that these are guidelines and not rules; they may not be applicable or desirable under all circumstances.
Key points for Interaction Design
Interactivity is important for engaging children. However, interactivity for its own sake is rarely useful; interaction should generally support the implementation of a pedagogical principle or a user task. Interaction should also be designed to encourage a natural ‘flow’ through the materials.
Interaction design considerations include:
- Exploration. Children are more prepared to explore than adults. They are happy to ‘mine-sweep’ (i.e. click on things just to see what they’ll do, even if it’s not immediately apparent).
- Provide good affordances. Although children will mine-sweep, clickable regions on a page should actually look clickable (a link ‘affords’ clicking, just a door handle ‘affords’ opening). Otherwise a lot of time may be spent trying to explore page elements that don’t serve any function.
- Make links easy to select. Don’t make links or clickable regions too small. Fitts Law states that the time taken to click on a target is a function of its distance to the cursor and its size. In other words, larger & nearer objects are much easier (quicker) to select than far, distant objects. So making links & buttons larger will tend to increase usability. This is especially true for young children who may not have advanced mouse skills.
- Provide rewards for progress. Provide motivation for children by providing rewards for progress (e.g. end of a linear section, completion of a test). These might take the form of praise, entertaining animations/sounds or a certificate of achievement.
- Reduce short-term memory load. Good interfaces should not require children to remember options, controls, locations etc. This can be achieved by (i) providing contextualized help where appropriate (ii) making options and choices explicit. (Note: Encouraging mine-sweeping increases short term memory load, so the benefits of exploration should be weighed up against the costs of increased memory load; providing good affordances and having relatively few options will help).
- Avoid drag-and-drop interactivities (or similar), especially for younger children. Motor and mouse skills are less well developed in younger children, so high-effort, precision interactivities such as drag and drop may present a barrier.
- Avoid superfluous interaction. Interaction has the potential to make content/materials more engaging, but having superfluous interactions that bear no direct relevance to the task being performed is a risk since children might be distracted by them. As a result, they may end up engaging with the page, but not with the materials that you want them to engage with!
- Feedback. Provide clear feedback on progress and tailor feedback based on the outcome of any interactivities. Provide direction for future actions.
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About
I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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