Ten design lessons from the literature on child development and children's use of technology

Abstract

The existing knowledge base on child development offers a wealth of information that can be useful for the design of children's technology. Furthermore, academic journals and conference proceedings provide us with a constant stream of new research papers on child-computer interaction and interaction design for children. It will require some effort from designers to gather and digest the scattered research results and theoretical knowledge applicable to their products. We conducted an extended research project whereby the existing knowledge relating to the design of technology for children aged five to eight have been gathered and presented in a way that makes it accessible and useful to designers in practice. This paper provides and extract from that research, focusing on ten useful lessons learnt from existing literature.

Design and evaluation guidelines for mental health technologies

“…Design guidelines have played an important role in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with usability inspection methods based on heuristics in widespread use (Nielsen, 1993). At this point, basic design guidelines are well established, with new contributions focussing on particular domains (Gelderblom and Kotz, 2009;Haber and Bailey, 2007;Karkkinen et al, 2008). As a new application area with very distinct concerns, there is a need to establish guidelines for the development of mental health technologies.…”

Floors and Flexibility

“…For example, program designers must attend to children's fine motor control. Compared to adults, children struggle holding down the mouse for extended periods or even double-clicking; therefore, young children tend to perform point-and-click movements more quickly and accurately than drag-and-drop commands [15,27]. As another example, young children can become easily distracted by complex interfaces, and Halgren et al chose to redesign interface by hiding advanced tools, so children (ages 5-14) would not stumble upon them and get lost in their functionality [16].…”

Methods and Techniques for Involving Children in the Design of New Technology for Children

“…For years, developmental experts have researched the ways in which children are different from adults, and how child development progresses over time [90,116]. We should apply this knowledge of child development both in the technologies that we design [42] and how we interact with children in technology design processes. Due to developmental differences, children need different supports and scaffolds in order to accomplish design activities than adults do.…”