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Using Typography in User Interface Design for Children

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Using Typography in User Interface Design for Children

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It is essential to note that tolerance toward reading and understanding text varies greatly, depending on the age of children and whether they are pre-readers, beginning readers, or readers with middling skills. In most cases, your use of text should be moderate unless you are designing specific areas of an application that need to accommodate large amounts of text—for example, on community pages, forums, Help pages, or game discussion boards—for children who have experience reading.

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/06/effective-use-of-typography-in-applications-for-children-3.php

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Liam is an active 8 year old boy at school, many would consider hyperactive. He is highly intelligent and reads at above peer level.

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Georgie is a 5 year old girl in transition starting to learn her sight words at school.

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Caitlin is nine and is ahead of her reading age, she is fluent in sight words.
Goal is to find out if the app is still of interest at this point. Will other features like the stories and seasons hold her attention

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Adam is a 8 year old boy with dyslexia and sensory issues who finds it hard to retain information and is 2 years behind in his reading level

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Title Designing for Children's Mobile Storytelling.(Research Article)(Report)
Author Franckel, Sonia Bonsignore, Elizabeth Druin, Allison
Subjects Storytelling – Technology Application Mobile Devices – Usage Human-Computer Interaction – Research
Mobile technologies offer novel opportunities for children to express themselves in-context, seamlessly, without disrupting the flow of their formal learning activities or informal play. Most contemporary mobile devices are equipped with multimedia support that can be used to create multimodal stories that represent the rich life narratives children experience, imagine, and want to share. The authors investigated these issues over a 9-month series of participatory design sessions in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. In this article, the authors describe their work with children in designing mobile tools for story creation and collaboration. Throughout this work, they asked the following questions: What stories do children want to tell, and how do they want to convey them in a mobile context? The findings suggest the need for mobile technology-based applications that support children's unique storytelling habits, particularly interruptability and multimodality.

The Role of Children in the Design of New Technology

Authors Allison Druin

A case study illustrates how even young children can contribute to the technology design process.
Abstract. This paper suggests a framework for understanding the roles that children can play in the technology design process, particularly in regards to designing technologies that support learning. Each role, user, tester, informant and design partner has been defined based upon a review of the literature and the author’s own laboratory research experiences
https://www.dropbox.com/s/unc8a2fo7gcejjh/The%20role%20of%20children%20in%20the%20design%20of%20new%20technology.pdf?dl=0

Interaction Design and Children

Author

Druin, Allison

Hourcade, Juan Pablo

Subjects

Children -- Psychological Aspects

Storytelling -- Research

Storytelling -- Innovations

Is Part Of

Communications of the ACM, Jan, 2005, Vol.48(1), p.32(3)

Description

Researchers are developing new technologies to enable children to know, explore and respect other cultures, to foster communication, storytelling and creativity among children, by understanding their unique needs. A glimpse of the diverse research landscape for Interaction Design and Children (IDC) that include the technology design process, new technology development and empirical evaluation is offered.

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Ideas for Conducting UX Research with Children

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Ideas for Conducting UX Research with Children

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Use Gamification Techniques to Keep Motivation

Don’t forget that most children have fairly short attention spans and try not to conduct research that lasts for hours. However, don’t be afraid to try and win back children’s attention using gamification. Have stars or sweets to hand out for participating in an exercise.

Consider using stick on smiley faces (and sad faces) to help children communicate their ideas too.

Always keep changing things up and try to provide as many different means to communicate and stay engaged as possible and don’t be afraid to improvise if something doesn’t seem to be working. It happens

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ideas-for-conducting-ux-research-with-children

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The first thing I noticed was that there wasn't a lot of horizontal space on their tiny netbooks. A lot of this was taken up by status bars, so the screen area was relatively wide, but not very tall. I'd thought a lot about how the site would adapt horizontally, but I hadn't done that much testing on how it would adapt vertically.

*With the new design is is intuitive to scroll down the page to see each feature

In testing, the fold was a big issue. The way the page was designed made it look like it stopped shorter than it did, and they weren't really scrolling at all on a key page.
After the sessions, I mentioned this to Cennydd Bowles who has done a lot of usability studies, and he suggested that Object Permanence might be relevant.
Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched.

On further research, it looks like this would only be an issue with very young children (aged 2 and younger), but I thought I'd mention it here anyway in case anyone is designing for children that age.
http://www.maban.co.uk/70/

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There are two ways to verify digital products designed for kids: doing a former user test with them or either sitting by their side, letting them play and just observe unobtrusively.

The problem testing with kids

In our experience, children have a hard time structuring and expressing the most important things of their experience in order for you to get “real” information on what’s bothering them.

Kids, especially the younger ones, often tend to be non-critical. Since they do not express all their thoughts, you need to constantly ask questions to make them speak their minds. To questions like “Do you like this?”, “Do you find it easy?” “Nice?” … and more, their answer, invariably, is: “Yes”, “Love it”, “Like it”, “It’s great”.

Therefore, in our case, this way is not the best method for gathering useful information from children if the aim is to identify design problems.

What we need to do is observe. All the time.
https://medium.com/@karinai/usability-testing-with-kids-3d1cd98e2750#.r2yrqs9nd

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Guidelines for user testing with children 

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Guidelines for user testing with children 

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The number of children One of the first decisions when planning a user test with children is how many participants are needed to detect a sufficient percentage of problems. Several researchers have shown that the first three to five test participants are enough to find 80% of the usability problems
http://www.undesigning.nl/productergonomie/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Guidelines_for_user_testing_with_children.pdf

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Simple and minimal design elements are en vogue for websites to provide adults a “distraction-free” environment in which to accomplish tasks quickly and easily. Adults explore a site or app with purpose, while children primarily go online for entertainment. An all-white background with shades of grey text may cause your little user to wander away from the computer or drop mom’s phone out of disinterest.

You will need big, bold, cheerful colors and pictures to hold the attention of children and help them navigate.

Icons are wonderful for adults who understand abstraction and can extrapolate meaning from them; but children, especially younger ones, will take these icons in a much more literal sense. Navigation and menu icons should always convey as literally as possible where the child will be taken if they select it.

A clear indication of how to get back home should always be present in case they get lost and need to find their way back.

https://www.usertesting.com/blog/2015/04/29/ux-for-kids/

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Use of icons/dashboard style is increasingly being used across all manner of websites - even govt sites for adults.