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.

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

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

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

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

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.