Designing for kids — 5 resources to help creating better products for children
Since I started to be interested in products for children, I realise everyday a little more that it is a very specific domain and that one needs to approach the design process carefully. Kids are curious, very open to input and assimilate rapidly; your product can therefore have a big impact, positive or negative.
Designing digital products for kids is also new. Think about it, it’s only been a few decades since we started to build digital products at all, and only a few years since we show more consideration for children products (of course there have been pioneers such as the like of Toca Boca).
I collected here 5 good resources for anyone interested in designing for kids.
1. Designing Digital Product for Kids
Let’s start with a book. Author Rubens Cantuni is an Italian digital product designer, and his book is a perfect introduction to anyone wanting to design for kids. It is clear, concise and comes rapidly to the point. I like how Rubens Cantuni covers multiple angles of designing products for kids, from concept to UI to marketing. The chapter on gamification is one where I would enjoy a deeper discussion, as I am keen to put a bigger warning sign on the benefits vs risk of gamification for kids.
You can find the book here:
2. UX Design for children (Nielsen Norman Group)
The Nielsen Norman Group has a massive report (399 pages) on UX Design for Children. I did not get the full report yet but they have short interesting articles on their site based from the report.
Here are a couple of them:
I like the point in this last one: Instructions should be tailored to the kids’ level of understanding. The capability to read is probably one of the first things not taken into consideration and optimised for in kids’ products.
3. Putting Education in Educational Apps
This report, even though a few years old, is a good read for anyone working on products that have an educational aspect.
2 examples of things I take from it:
- the concept of 4 pillars of learning felt like a simple framework to look your product through and see how it connects to those pillars. I discovered then that the UNESCO also has 4 pillars of education, which look similar but are not directly the same.
“Humans learn best when they are actively involved (“minds-on”), engaged with the learning materials and undistracted by peripheral elements, have meaningful experiences that relate to their lives, and socially interact with others in high-quality ways around new material.”
- the quote below about television. I have always liked Dora the Explorer as a show for kids, and I believe there is still a big place for television-like content to be more inspiring for kids than just random cartoons.
Meaningful learning in television. Several studies have demonstrated that children better learn educational content from television when it is “on the plotline.” Chil- dren are better able to recall educational content that is directly tied to the narrative of a program (Fisch, 2004; Hall & Williams, 1993). For example, when children watch a character in a show solve a mystery by figuring out the missing letters in a written clue (Fisch, 2004), they are more likely to remember the spelling of the word than when the word is just repeated. Characters who advance the plot by using targeted educational concepts or content lead to more retention of those concepts by children. Educational content that is irrelevant or tangen- tial to the plotline is less likely to be recalled.
4. Developing an Inclusive Letter Writing App
This is a pretty interesting article following the development of a letter app which feels a lot like Letter School.
Their supplementary material is a great example on how to structure interview work.
5. D4CR - Designing for Children’s Rights Guide
Finally, there is the children’s design guide, which I referenced a few times already in previous articles. I like how simple and straightforward the 10 principles are and the fact that if you look into each principle, you can find external content related to it.
I wish that it would be pushed one step further and that there would be more contribution and concrete examples, in the style of Rubens’ book.
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