9 Design Insights We Got from UX Testing on Kids

Alicia Avrach / November 05, 2014

Why test the ThoughtSpot user experience on children? Because we could. We had a spare pair of 9-year-old twin boys whose parents both work here. (So no children were harmed, no labor laws broken.)

You probably test your user experience in various ways: A/B testing, wire-framing, recorded stream of consciousness walkthroughs. Have you tried testing it on kids?

“But our software isn’t meant for kids,” you say.

Stick with me for a minute. I took a class at Stanford’s d.school last Spring. One design thinking method we learned was to try testing outside the normal range of individuals you define as your “users.” This includes outliers based on geography, demographics, or use case.

Hence, the kids. But first, we had to find a data context they could understand. We chose to use historical baseball statistics from Sean Lahman. Sean makes the data available for use under a Creative Commons license. (Thanks, Sean!)

Here’s what we learned.

1. Our “user” is smarter than we think. We worry a lot about the person we think our end user is. Will they know what to do? Will they get confused? Nobody reads user manuals anymore, and they shouldn’t have to. But children like to play with new things, and they will explore and learn on their own. The kids learned how to type in their questions to get baseball stats in under five minutes.
2. The first experience has to be good. Kids approach everything as entertainment. When you’re competing with Minecraft and YouTube for eyeballs, your stuff better be easy and fun to use.
3. Familiar data matters. We didn’t use financial data. We used baseball stats. It’s a natural choice — since the kids love baseball cards, the data was familiar. Choosing a dataset the testers know makes it easy for them to come up with questions to ask. Remember to keep it age appropriate, too! Police blotters, for example, are interesting, but may not be the best choice for kids.
4. Data provides a huge learning opportunity. Okay, granted: Our kids may be a bit geekier than your average fourth grader. But it is worlds more fun to explore formulas and data integrity using a search engine than with a Common Core worksheet.
5. We are old. The world has changed. Kids are expert at search. My Google search history is filled with searches for Pokemon, Minecraft, and Angry Birds. I can’t remember when they learned how to search. It’s not like we sent them to summer camp to learn how to use Google. They learned over time on their own, by trial and error.
6. Kids have no concept of relational data. The boys did not have a mental picture of tables in a database. They don’t know a column from a row, and SQL is just a bunch of letters to them. Yet they were able to type a few words in the search bar and work from there.
7. Spell check is important. When you’re 9, you may have memorized the stats for the top 10 pitchers of all time, but you still type in “picher” to search for them. We needed to add a spell check feature to the product.
8. Data is a great teacher of character. The kids searched for the pitcher with the highest number of game losses, which turns out to be Cy Young. Then they searched for hte pitcher with the most wins. If you know anything about baseball, you know that the answer is the same. The lesson? It takes a lot of tries to get a lot of success. Failure can lead to improvement if you use it to learn.
9. Homework is all about data now. One of the kids brought home a school assignment to look up the ballpark attendance of their favorite team and chart it annually over time. The “old fashioned” way of finding the information might be to do a Google search. But he had access to our baseball database. I told him it would be find to use it, so long as he could search for the answers himself. Here’s what he found:

Go on, give your kids some extra screen time. You might be surprised what you (and they) can learn.

Originally published at www.thoughtspot.com on November 5, 2014.