The Usability of Mobile Applications for Pre-schoolers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of usability in user interface (UI) design of mobile educational applications (MEA) designed for children aged 4-5 years. Usability testing was conducted with four children to evaluate the UI design based on the children's mental model in addition to the quality of their learning experience. An eye tracking glasses was utilized to capture the children's eye movements while the usability heuristics was used to collect the descriptive data regarding the interface design. Results indicated that the usability study can be considered as a multi-stage problem solving process where it analyses and foresee how the children use a product and the actual first-time users' intuition of their design experience and learning curve. The observation, eye tracking data and usability testing of the MEA with the four children validates that the UI application was based on the developers and designers adult mental model and guideline or own assumptions. This paper ends with a suggestion of a UI design guideline of design elements and principles for designers and developers to adhere when developing MEA for children.

Anthropomorphic Character on Prototyping Cognitive Video Game for Preschoolers

“…It modeled game character determination based on the survey result of children's (as user) preference tendency toward game character using pediatric development expert opinion regarding it, or commonly known as usability survey [16]. This study was a collaboration between experts in pediatric psychology and game design [17] that resulted in the appropriate and suitable game character recommendation for children in the game that was designed specifically for a preschooler.…”

Αξιολόγηση των ελληνικών εκπαιδευτικών εφαρμογών για συσκευές με λειτουργικό σύστημα Android για παιδιά προσχολικής ηλικίας.

“…Στάδιο κατά το οποίο, εκτός των άλλων, τα παιδιά αναπτύσσουν τις κινητικές τους δεξιότητες και έχουν περιορισμό στην ποσότητα των πληροφοριών που είναι σε θέση να επεξεργαστούν διανοητικά (Vatavu, Cramariuc & Schipor, 2015). Ωστόσο, συχνά οι κατευθυντήριες γραμμές για τον σχεδιασμό κινητών εφαρ-μογών προέρχονται από την έρευνα ή την εμπειρία η οποία βασίζεται σ' άλλου τύπου συ-σκευές ή από διαφορετικές ομάδες χρηστών (Brown et al, 2010• Masood & Thigambaram, 2015. Τα παιδιά έχουν μικρότερα δάχτυλα, πιο αδύναμους βραχίονες και χαμηλή επιδεξιό-τητα στο χειρισμό των χεριών (Anthony et al, 2012), και, ως εκ τούτου, δεν είναι σε θέση να ασχοληθούν με ακρίβεια με μικρούς στόχους και να εφαρμόσουν τεχνικές τύπου «μεταφοράς και απόθεσης» (αγγλ.…”

GlassesViewer: Open-source software for viewing and analyzing data from the Tobii Pro Glasses 2 eye tracker

“…In the past several decades, mobile (head-worn) eye tracking has become a popular research method that has found widespread use across a range of fields. The opportunity afforded by head-worn eye-tracking setups to acquire data on the visual behavior of participants who freely move around has enabled researchers to conduct studies in fields such as vision science (Land, 1992;Land & Lee, 1994;Ballard et al, 1995;Pelz & Canosa, 2001;Matthis et al, 2018), social interaction between adults (Ho et al, 2015;Rogers et al, 2018;Macdonald & Tatler, 2018;Rogers et al, 2019) or children and their parents (Yu & Smith, 2017;Suarez-Rivera et al, 2019), usability (Masood & Thigambaram, 2015;Bergstrom & Schall, 2014), marketing (Harwood & Jones, 2014), decision making (Gidlöf et al, 2013;Gidlöf et al, 2017), surgery (Dik et al, 2016;Harrison et al, 2016), navigation and wayfinding (Kiefer et al, 2014;Koletsis et al, 2017) and education (McIntyre et al, 2017;McIntyre & Foulsham, 2018).…”