Kids like challenges and conflict, whereas adults like to just accomplish tasks with no challenges or anything getting in the way.
Conflict play help children to:
Predict how others react to their behaviour
Controlling emotions
Communicating clearly
Seeing other pints of view
Resolving disagreements
Kids love visual and auditory feedback, every interaction needs to produce some sort of response or reaction.
Adults like feedback when they do something successful or wrong. Adults get annoyed when every click results in a sound or animation.
Kids like to be rewarded for everything they do.
Build safeguards understanding trust issues to protect young users.
Designing levels, to hard to design for a broad age range, therefore levels can help different age groups access different content and activities.
Adults are generally pretty consistent.
Similarities when designing for kid and adults;
Consistency, design patterns are consistent, no spontaneous animations or sounds which don’t contribute to the overall goal.
Not everything on the screen needs to move.
Keep interactions and feedback consistent.
Purpose, need to be immediately engaged in the goals and purpose of the app, they need to know what is in it for them before they’re willing to fully engage.
Need to communicate clearly what the app is and how it works quickly.
“lagniappe”, an ‘easter egg’, small unexpected interactions that enhance their experience with a site or app.
Make a conscious effort to understand where your users are cognitively, physically and emotionally and make sure that your designs map to them appropriately.
Coalmarch
Forces you to think about distilling the web experience to its basics. High degrees of interactivity and feedback.
Still need to deploy the same design approaches to kid’s design so that parents feel confident that you ‘get it’.
Content - Geared towards kids and families. Engaging and informative enough for the adults to make informed decisions but at the same time simple enough for the child to understand.
Bold bright colours and lots of images, keep the text to a minimum.
High degree of interactivity and feedback.
Simple organisation and layout.
Make name and branding extremely clear, clearly defined and hard to miss navigation.
New fun and engaging ways to present information.
Intuitive gestures for children such as tapping.
Navigation and menu icons should always convey as literally as possible, whereas adults can understand more abstract icons.
A clear indication of how to get back home.
Nick Jr Games.
Children primarily go online for entertainment.
Apple’s kids category in the apps.
Designers aren’t kids, observing child’s play with toys, learning how children interact, what captures their attention and what bores them.
Affordances, Design interactive elements that indicates they are interactive and tappable., for example buttons could have backgrounds, outlines or drop shadow. Items should wiggle/sparkle or draw attention to the user somehow.
Menus needs to be simple and outright explicit. Don’t just rely on words, just try to use icons and little text.
Feedback, context and sound - Adults want feedback when things go wrong kids want feedback wherever anything happens. Feedback in the form of pages changing, items moving or sounds. Feedback is especially important in educational apps. If they get something wrong, explain and give them another chance. Use these moments as teaching opportunities. Provide contextual feedback and display hints showing users how to succeed using no text.
Context - Where will children be using the app, at home, at school, or somewhere in between, if your app is used at school , need multiple users at multiple levels. User profiles, avatars, saving progress.
Sound can be used but most apps should be just as usable without.
What role to adults play in the app, maybe they are a separate type of user all together, may need to log in to a separate section, to check progress.
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