Fun, games and challenges when designing experiences for kids
On the 25th of February Ladies that UX London hosted another great user experience event.
Lucy Gill, Savena Surana, Shu-Ting Huan and Nicky Borasinski present their methods and findings when designing for children.
Designing with Children in Mind
Lucy Gill talks about her wide experience as a UX designer and focussing on testing and designing for children.
She asks “does UX really matter in children’s experiences”? The obvious answer is yes, but it differs in some aspects from UX in adults’ products.
Children can be oddly patient when interacting with digital experiences, they can spend a long time trying to make something badly design work anyway for the sake of completing a task. They won’t find, though, content and features that aren’t visible and obvious. You should use animation or visual guidelines to grab attention.
Another important aspect to consider when designing for pre-schoolers or young students is to have non verbal inductions and instructions, so they can start the experience in a smooth and natural way without having to read. The key takeaway on tutorials is that children don’t listen to them, they often want to get directly into the game and most experiences don’t support hints and tutorials after that first induction moment. If you’re designing a children focussed experience, you should add contextual hints and possible tutorial after it has already started and passed the induction phase.
We talk a lot about ease of use in UX, but is it the best solution when creating something for a younger audience? Lucy thinks this isn’t the right approach for kids who are learning new things every day, as they should be challenged and learn to overcome everyday struggles. Easy games aren’t fun. As designers, we need to find the right balance to offer an experience that is challenging just enough to not overwhelm. To know where that edge of difficulty is, you need to know the age and stage of development of your particular audience, considering that — at such a young age — even few months might make a difference.
Lucy highlights how trying to test innovative approaches early on is more effective than waiting for something more definitive to put in front of children. The big difference from adult user testing is that kids will try to please you or won’t be able to fully phrase why something is good or bad, therefore observation will be often more useful to you than interviews to have rich feedbacks.
5 key takeaways:
1. Good UX is key
2. Onboarding should be: playful, simple, tested
3. Challenge MUST be intelligently designed
4. Remove UX barriers but retain challenge
5. User testing from the start is feasible and invaluable
Kids aren’t all the same, obviously
We live in a technological era and digital skills are becoming more and more fundamentals in the world of tomorrow. With this in mind, Savena Surana and the rest of the Bright Little Labs created Detective Dot. Savena explains to us how they wanted to create no only a game that could teach kids to code and have a strong understanding of the digital world, but also experience empathy and social skills.
Detective Dot has a diverse background, she represents a kind of child that is not usually visible enough and she does it fighting stereotypes with her scientifically curious mind. She represents to kids something they might not see in more mainstream media or videogames.
Savena explains to us how this game makes children complete missions to beat an evil character that wants all their data, teaching to them at the same times subjects and concepts that are useful for a computer science curriculum.
One of the ways Bright Little Labs knows that Dot is as real as possible, is speaking with people with a similar background as their character, they have periodic consultants that will give them inputs to have a fully fleshed personality for Dot. Another way of testing how the character looks and acts like is to put the different iterations in front of children as the end user. Their opinions help to shape how Dot looks like to define where she’s from.
Savena and her team make sure they interact with kids as often as possible to keep always in their minds who they are designing for. Children will come up with ideas and comments that can really inspire the whole product and make it more diverse, more realistic and more authentic. What authenticity means, though, is different for different people and it’s important to remember you can’t please everyone.
Designing STEM Products for kids
Learning is a cumulative and iterative process made of multiple experience.
Shu-Ting Huang and her team at Kano based their product on the idea that children should make, create and have fun with it. One of their key principle for the interactive learning experience they created around coding and computer science is to demystify technology. How Kano reaches this is simple steps, creativity and rewards. This system, paired with a community based platform, has proven highly effective to engage and involve children from a young age into coding.
Children between 8 and 10, the key audience of Kano, prefer to directly start tasks instead of reading instructions and a lot of interfaces don’t offer help after the first induction. Ting shows us how Kano helps kids to explore things on the fly and tries to use as much as possible the cause-effect principle to give tips and guidance in the right moments.
Ting introduces us to one of the pillars of Kano’s approach to product development: low floor, high ceiling, wide wall. This concept was firstly developed by Seymour Papert, and it consists in the idea of creating multiple paths from low floor to reach the high ceiling. The low floor represents a child entry point to a new concept or subject, high ceiling represents more sophisticated projects and complex concepts, wide wall are the possibility of diverse paths that can be taken to reach the high ceiling starting from a low floor.
Low floor, or the entry point, is all about empowerment, the ability children have to create and have the idea that they can and are able to create. It’s the moment when they need the most encouragement. Here parents and teachers can be facilitators.
High ceiling has a lot of uncertainty, pressure and stress, so Ting and her team uses the help of the community to decrease the amount of pressure children might feel at this point. They have a highly moderated and secure open forum, but at the same time they don’t just leave more advance learners to themselves.
The wide wall represents the multiple paths and everyone has a personalised interaction, both with the community and with the tasks. Children can always receive a new brief and approach it as they see fit, without being forced into a solution. Once the high ceiling is reached, the white canvas issue could block someone to get to a more creative and advance stage with coding, so the platform still stimulates the advance learners with more complex projects and tries to keep them engaged and active making more personal and meaningful projects for them. Motivation is key to create a compelling experience throughout.
How Voice and other New Technologies Impact Kids Services
Voice activation is on the rise and surprisingly the biggest amount of people using smart speakers are children. They create narratives and interact with Alexa powered devices on a daily bases. With this in mind, Nicky Borasinski and her team created the Alexa powered game When in Rome. The game works with the collaboration of a table board and cards, Alexa and two or more players.
Not every two years old is the same, highlights Nicky, therefore you should really cater for the type of children you want to use your product. This is a consistent conclusion that all speakers came to when developing their designs.
Alexa, tells us Nicky, is not a device designed for kids, even if Amazon is now releasing a new children focused range of products. It’s challenging to find skills for Alexa and it’s clearly not something a kid would do. Parents are the gatekeepers and it’s important to involve them in the experience you’re designing. For example, avoiding extremely repetitive patterns or loud noise would be massively appreciated by an adult even if it’s something many kids find compelling.
The advantage of a voice interface is that children and parents can face each others and interact in a more natural way, making it more about social play. Using this as a starting point makes for very strong products, as it won’t teach a new behaviour, but simply augmenting an experience children and parents are already having. And on this point, remember always that children love to be tactile, which is why is important to find physical media to help create a more compelling experience, such as the cards and board of When in Rome.
5 key takeaways:
1. Tailor to audience and age, important for example to consider how do they access language
2. Lean into a child natural curiosity and existing behaviour
3. Smart speakers don’t give suggestions, so cater for graceful failure
4. Get theatrical
5. Don’t forget parents
Panel Q&A
At the end of the talks, the speakers answer some questions from the audience, these are some of the most useful answers.
Q: How can I recruit for testing with children?
A: Places like libraries, community spaces and day cares are context where parents and children are together and can be approached more easily. It can be useful to have places where to have testing regularly if allowed.
Q: How do you design for disability when working with children?
A: It might be difficult to include some specific segments, but the important thing is to understand the challenge and recruit with the help of parents and teachers.
Q: When I design for kids, should I also test with adults?
A: Yes, they are the key buyer and one of the key audiences, sometimes is useful to do separate testing and having interviews with parents, while observation is more useful in younger kids. It might be useful, depending on the case, to have teacher involved and have a classroom environment as well. It’s of course mandatory to have permission from parents when testing.
Q: What else is fundamentally different between adults’ UX and children’s?
A: Collaboration needs to be as easy as possible, and looking how they interact instead of interacting with them yourself. Making it more fun and more of an activity is surely important and give always a context as it’s less easy for children to imagine the exact context you want during testing.
Q: How do I start designing for children?
A: Let’s start saying you need to like children! Also, you need an DBS check as you’ll have to work with minors. A part from this you should read parenting books if you haven’t before, read studies on how kids play, volunteers with charities and communities related to children. It’s really rewarding and interesting to work with kids.
All the speakers present different technology solutions, both educational and entertaining, that are highly successful and engaging for a younger audience.
We hope you appreciate our speakers insights and that your will participate to our next event in London.
