On May 14th, I gave a talk at UX Lisbon about User Experience Design for Kids. Now, for a bit of background:

Back in November, we embarked on an ambitious project in collaboration with a major elearning company. The challenge? To design an application that would cater for US students, aged 6-18.

As part of the initial discovery phase of the project, we undertook desk research as well as three rounds of usability testing with different groups of students based on age.

From our desk research, there wasn’t a whole lot out there in terms of user experience design. So we had to look elsewhere, specifically in three areas: games, education and entertainment.

Why were we doing this? Because desk research is a relatively quick and cheap way to get on top of a topic. Complimented by usability testing we were able quickly discover what differences, if any, we’d need to cater for when designing for “kids”.

Setting out our stall: creating design principles

The practical outcome of this phase was a set of “design principles”. These design principles gave us our parameters. They were there to help us focus the direction of our designs, communicate our designs to everyone involved and to help us validate our designs.

So, here are just some of the design guidelines or principles we came up with.

Principle 1: Kids are different, but user centred design process isn’t

“We are immigrants in the land of our children”, John Perry Barlow, lyricist with The Grateful Dead and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What I think he was saying here is that kids are now wired differently. They’ve grown up in as digital natives and we’re, for the most part, immigrants in that world. (Mark Prensky explores this “divide” in more detail – PDF)

Kids are different. Not just from adults or “big people” but from each other (and even they know it).

“Sesame Street? Nah, that’s for babies” – 6 year old usability test participant.

Where it could matter, in design terms, is in how we catered for reading ability, dexerity or cognitive reasoning. One example where we saw the impact of these differences was in usability testing, in a number of areas.

• Boredom: the younger age groups got bored after about 15 minutes of testing and it was difficult to help them keep their focus.
  Key lesson: make usability testing shorter and make it more fun.
• Prototyping: We had created a pretty high fidelity interactive prototype. We were pretty happy with it. Yet, younger kids could spot the lack of polish. They found it more difficult to get over the inadequacies of our prototype and fill in the gaps.
  Key lesson: make it as real as you can.

“It doesn’t look like fun coz it looks like people stuff, not kids stuff”, another 6 year old usability test participant

Despite all these differences, however, one of the big things we took from this is not to silo kids into different groups.

The important thing was that we engaged with them as part of a thorough user centred design process. In terms of approach, then, they aren’t that different – we needed to engage with them to figure out what they needed, classic and established user-centred design.

Next week, Principle 2: Designing age appropriately and some good examples of this in action.