Making apps for kids: Part 4

Some lessons learned in the making of Quick Math Jr.

Welcome to the final post of our Making Apps for Kids series! Check out parts 1, 2 and 3, or keep reading for Part 4.

Designing touch screen interactions for little fingers

Have you ever watched a young child use a touchscreen device and just thought… wow!?

It’s common to hear young children today described as “digital natives”; so comfortable with technology that they’re navigating it with ease before they can even walk or talk.

Which makes designing apps for this “digital native” generation pretty easy, right?

Well… not exactly.

In my previous posts I’ve touched on the value of frequent user testing with kids during our development process. Yes, we’re looking for evidence of high engagement, learning progress, and the usability of our app, but we’re also simply watching the way kids interact with the app and with touchscreen devices in general.

Because, almost always, we see things we hadn’t even thought to consider!

With all the “digital native” hype it’s easy to overlook the fact that there are differences in the ways adults and children interact with mobile devices. Remember that these devices, and the developer guidelines supporting them, have been created with the “typical” adult user in mind, not a still-developing child.

When designing an app for you children you need to factor their developing cognitive, emotional and physical motor skills into your decisions, digital natives or not. Here are some of the things we’ve found that you might want to consider:

Physical limitations

Most obviously, young children are smaller and weaker than the average adult, so:

• Watch for the way children hold devices while playing. Can they still comfortably navigate the app?
• Reconsider interactions which require lifting, carrying, or shaking the device, or be prepared for sore arms and flying iPads! It’s very difficult for kids to hold or carry a device and interact with it at the same time. We often see children place the tablet on the floor and then lie or sit over it. This means that the device inadvertently slides around during play, and interactions triggered by moving or shaking the device could get in the way and potentially frustrate the user.

Poor motor skills

On top of being physically weaker than the “typical” user, young children are also hampered by their developing motor skills, so:

• Don’t require interactions with sustained screen contact. When dragging, young children struggle to maintain finger contact with the screen. Taps or short drags are easier for children to manage. Alternatively, allow children to continue an interaction after losing contact with the screen. For example, Quick Math Jr. includes a handwriting component where children can remove their finger from the screen but can then continue drawing the same character.

• Make targets nice and big. Even though they have smaller fingers, children are less accurate then adults when it comes to hitting small targets.
• Make sure interactions happens on touch rather than release. Children often lack the motor skills for quick finger movements, so a child’s “touch” is often really a touch-and-hold.

Egocentricity

Children touch everywhere. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. Children have an egocentric view of the world (more so than adults!). They essentially expect touch-screens to read their mind, and become frustrated when the device responds in an unexpected way, such as when deliberate touches are ignored or when accidental touches are not ignored! So:

• Control for extra touches. Performing gestures with one finger can be difficult for young children, who will often use two fingers (e.g. both index fingers) to drag a single object. Children intuitively expect this to work the same way as a single touch — just as it would in the real world!
• BUT ignore extra hands on the screen. Children will often hold the device with thumbs overlapping the screen, or rest either hand on the screen while they are playing. They do not expect this to trigger any behaviour.
• AND support deliberate multi-touch. Children will often play together on the same device (even when they all have their own!). They expect to be able to interact with the same screen at the same time. This also allows children to use multiple fingers for multiple simultaneous interactions, another thing we often see young children do.

Image credit: Thijs Knaap

• Finally, be prepared for all sorts of unexpected gestures and make sure you TEST WITH KIDS! It really uncovers all sorts of things we as adults would never think to test. For example, we found a bug in Quick Math Jr. when a young tester decided to “push” an animated train by repeatedly tapping and dragging on the screen during the animation, resulting in a crash. Unsurprisingly, we hadn’t tested that one in the office!

We hope you found this post helpful! For more information check out the previous posts in our Making Apps for Kids series: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

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