Designing the web experience for children.

David Lumerman,
Lil’ Fingers Storybooks.

Small children offer a very specific challenge to experience designers because they use websites differently then pre-teens, teenagers and adults. In fact, usability research with children has often been considered either too difficult to carry out with unruly subjects, or not necessary for an audience that is satisfied with gratuitous animations and funny noises[1].

Children five and under explore the web through guided discovery, looking for large visual cues like clickable maps and bright colorful graphics. They will click around looking for fun and interesting things to happen when they move their mouse. This is different than their older siblings who seek out and identify with cool looking graphics. Kids are keenly aware of their age and know what is designed for them, and what is designed for their younger siblings[2].

The “sense of scent” [3] popularized by Jared Spool , where users will follow visual cues to get to their goal like little breadcrumbs, manifests itself differently in young children. Where adults skim text for key words or ideas that match the expectation of what they are looking for, young children without developed reading and writing skills will gravitate towards pictures, icons, colors and graphics to build mental models of the world around them.

Color and graphics becomes a much more important to designing the experience. This can be seen when children from an early age identify with familiar icons and associate them with complex words or ideas. What child cannot identify the golden arches of McDonalds (red and yellow letter M), the script Coca-Cola logo (red letter C) or the graphic on Superman’s chest (red and yellow letter S)? All of these pose strong iconography and primary colors.

Studies with kids done by Microsoft[1] indicate designing icons meaningful to kids, and even styling the cursor to be more kid friendly to indicate the tasks to be performed and provides specific visual cues which to adults, would be gratuitous. Examples of such cursors would be graphically stylized magnifier glasses indicating zoom functions and paintbrush icons.

Children, especially young children, love and identify with characters. They can identify and derive comfort from them, and from an educational standpoint characters aid young children in the learning process[4]. As much as adults detest “Clippy” from the Microsoft suite of products, young kids love these types of characters. The enjoy interacting with them, and they in turn help them perform tasks.

Along with color and iconography, interaction points need to be findable by small hands. Fitts’ law[5] indicates that the larger and closer the target area, the easer it is for a user to navigate to it. This is especially true for curious children who may not have the dexterity and fine motor control of their older sibilings. For this reason larger more obvious target areas make for better clicking.

Buttons that look like buttons produce better results in all age groups, but take on a different meaning for youngsters who rely more heavily on icons and do not have a full understanding of general internet conventions that are learned by repetition and experience when using web sites habitually.

Studies by Jakob Nielsen[2] found that “children are incapable of overcoming many usability problems, this combined with kids' lack of patience in the face of complexity, results in many [children] simply leaving websites”.

Underlined blue links that take you from page to page, left navigation to traverse a site’s taxonomy, clicking logos to go back “home”, and advertising banners that take you “away” to a new site are not easily understood by young children, and as a result cannot be used as effective navigational tools.

In fact, banner ads pose a particular problem because children do not see these as separate from the experience, but as part of the experience. As a result, they are more apt to click on banner ads.

Another item to consider with young children is a shortened attention span. This means that not only should activities be fast loading and easily accessible but should be short in duration, and if possible be savable or recoverable to the point where the youngster last lost interest. This is mostly for the adult’s sanity to avoid replaying the first few activity sections over and over again.

Because of this limited attention span, instructions need to be short and memorable. Adult users don’t read long on-screen text item, children in contrast, may not understand or remember them, so short and sweet increases task completion.

Sound and music is also something that distinguishes this group from older users. Small children are generally delighted when their movements cause beeps, bangs and snaps. Their parents however, not so much.

Because of these limitations many websites are designed with co-discovery in mind where the heavy lifting, such as navigation and activity selection, is done by someone old enough to easily circumnavigate these pitfalls, leaving the activity horseplay to the kids.


Author

David Lumerman has a graduate degree in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) from Rensselaer Polytechnic, and for the past 10 years has developed Lil’ Fingers Storybooks (www.lil-fingers.com), a online computer storybook and activity site designed for young children.


References

(1) Hanna, L., Risden, K., Czerwinski, M., Alexander, K. The Role of Usability Research in Designing Children’s Computer Products. 1998. Microsoft Corporation. Online: http://research.microsoft.com/~marycz/druin98.htm

(2) Nielsen, J., Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children. 4/2002. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox. Online: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html

(3) Spool, J., Designing for the Scent of Information. 11/2004. User Interface Engineering. Online: http://www.uie.com/reports/scent_of_information/

(4) Blowers, H., Bryan, R. Weaving a Library Web: Guide to Developing Children’s Websites. American Library Associations. 5/2004; pp 71-73

(5) Fitts’ Law. Wikipedia. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law

The usability of Twitter

Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to broadcast small snippets of text to the twitter universe and your own small subset of this universe for friends and lurkers to read your posts. Posts are presented in chronological order with the newest posts on top and older posts fading off the page.

Twitter is crack presented to the blogosphere. But what makes it so addictive has a lot to do with good usability. Presented below is what twitter does right for the user and why it matters.

1. Immediate satisfaction
Twitter updates live every four minutes and hitting the refresh gives you new content immediately.

Posting is also as simple, usually showing up within seconds of posting, which then gets appended to your “recent” list.

2. Positive Identification
It’s not enough that text from friends and strangers parade across your screen, but there are photos associated with these text posts. Seeing the photos makes you want to read the text. It is no surprise that pretty young girls who post quirky interesting snippets have lots of followers. arielwaldman and kitta are followed partially because they have pretty faces and partially because of their interesting prose.

On my twitter (dlumer) I have numerous friends that have an associated photo and a few that don’t. I find the ones that have photos more interesting to read, even though what they type may not support this tendency. People like that human connection. They gravitate towards it.

3. Low cost of action
Twitter lets you collect friends easily. Simply by clicking on their icon or name you can “follow” them simply by clicking a follow button. There is no long process. It is very easy; making is easy to collect lots of friends or pseudo-friends. These friends can reciprocate just as easily and follow you.

Once the two-way communication is going, you can easily post back and forth in an ongoing dialog, like a party line that nobody hangs up on.

4. My Network, not your network
While you can surf the public timeline, the power of twitter is in the local network that appears as all your and your friends’ latest entries with the icons of people you specifically follow. This is the important “web 2.0” part, where the user is looking a collection of posts they assemble, not one based on groups like a mailing list. Each person’s twitter is unique to himself or herself, only containing the people you choose to follow – or “listen to”. If someone posts too much or turns out not to your liking, you can simply stop following them.

5. Context is king
Along with your specific view is the idea of context of the text. It is not enough to know a friend has posted, but it helps to know when, and sometimes how. Twitter has both, showing the messages with how long ago they posted and what type of device (web, txt message, applet) delivered the message.

From a systems perspective, the time requirement is satisfied by simply time stamping each entry. But from the user’s perspective it is much more important to know how long ago from this point in time a message was posted.

Approximate times are even better, because they are concepts easily assimilated. Knowing that a message was posted “about 3 hours ago” is infinitely more usable than knowing a message was posted at 4:34pm on January 8th. In the first instance the user must do a mental calculation for not only the date and time posted, but also the current time as well, to get to the same place as “about 3 hours ago”. If the cognitive load is greater than the information gained, the user generally disregards the mental calculation.


There are a couple of instances where Twitter falls down however as they try and balance the ease of use and information overload. The below presented information is not as much cut-and-dried criticism, as problems or opportunities for further refinement.

1. If a tree falls in the forest...
One of the largest holes in twitter is the inability to point messages to people who do not follow you. There are many instances where you follow someone, and read a post where the poster has asked a specific question to the group and you respond to that post – but the original poster never sees it because the don’t follow you.

Understandably there are good reasons to not allow just anyone to post to anywhere. You need only look in your email box’s spam filter for hundreds of reasons. The problem I see however is the lack of feedback that the message will never be seen. While I have no hard data to confirm this, the anecdotal data I have is based on peoples various posts, when they realize that they are missing out on posts and begin following people who have responded to them.

Additionally, the system does not have an in system way to “poke” a user, letting them know you are responding to them.

2. My message is bigger!
Twitter is designed for short bursts of message content. This message content may be a bit on the small side for many users. Many a time you get posts broken into 2 or 3 messages to get the whole thought out. This may be the extreme example, but I personally would love about 20 more characters most of the time.

To Twitter’s credit however they dynamically show you how many characters you have left in your message, and even visually change the display when you are about to run out of space. This is a tremendous step up from instant messenger’s “your post is too big so you are out of luck” message.

As you can see, overall twitter is a great assemblage of micro-blogging and social networking that allows people to easily stay in touch with others, and isn’t maintaining the human connection with computers what it’s all about?