Designing Digital Products for Kids — Guidelines
If you are creating an app or a digital product for kids, there are guidelines that are to be followed in order to make the app safe, educational, and something that is loved by children and parents.
These days, children become early tech users.
Sometimes this happens even before they learn how to speak, read, or write. Until a child is five years old, they are learning from their surroundings rapidly, they are observing and absorbing everything.
Whatever they are exposed to during these tender years of age, will form their internal self-talk, will form their beliefs, their perspective about themselves once they have grown up.
It is very vital that as product owners and as app creators, we are thinking of what we put into these apps.
To make it simpler for you, these are eight tips that you can use while creating your product.
Or if you already have a product consider these as a checklist that you can use to make sure that your product is truly child safe. And that it is helping your little users grow and learn from their environment.
#1 Match the skills
The first step is to consider the skills of the users. Children don’t yet have advanced motor skills as adults do, they are capable of performing only simple gestures, such as tap, scrawl, and swipe.
When you’re designing for children, try not to include gestures, such as double-tap, pinch, and zoom, or any other complex combination that will require fine motor skills.
#2 Don’t take the child outside the app
The second tip is to make sure that kids stay within the app and not venture into other apps. For example, avoid accidental (or intentional) clicks to a browser or to any page that requires a payment gateway.
Of course, there will be instances in which you want your users to go to a payment gateway. In this case, it is not the children but the parents. What we need is a gateway.
A gateway is a simple question. A simple puzzle, that is very easy for adults to solve. But it is a little hard or it is almost impossible for a child to solve. Use these as a gateway to make sure that it is the actual adult going to these pages and not the child themselves.
One example of a gateway is where you ask the user simple math question like what is 22+ 44. Or you ask them to type a few series of numbers like 3,4,5. And instead of writing the numbers, spell it out — three, four, and five.
This way, it is very easy for adults to comprehend and answer it. But for a child who is less than, say five or six years old, it might be a little difficult for him to do it.
#3 No ads
The third tip that I have for you is to refrain from showing ads to children less than five years of age. This is because kids do not understand if the ad is a part of the game itself, they don’t have that visual ability to distinguish between the game screen and the ad screen.
#4 Visual Design
The fourth tip I have for you is visual design. When a product is geared towards kids, these are the audiences that have a very low attention span. But they’re very good at identifying patterns and learning from their surroundings.
When you are designing for kids use interfaces that have very large icons and simple shapes
#5 Audiovisual Feedback
The fifth tip that I have for you is providing audiovisual feedback at every major interaction.
Instead of just changing the opacity of the button, like how we usually do for designing apps for adults, instead of that make the button you know shrink and expand in size and also have like an audio clue that lets the child know that their action has been registered.
#6 Multi-touch feature
The sixth tip that I have for you. And this is something that I’ve learned by observing my one-year-old daughter is to always enable a multi-touch feature on all of your screens.
For example, when a child holds the tablet or the phone, they are not really aware if their thumb is holding the touchscreen. And when they click the button with the other hand, nothing happens and they have no clue why nothing happens.
#7 Positive voice
And the seventh tip that I have for you is to always make sure that your app or your product is nurturing. You want to provide feedback to the kid when they use the app. That is how they learn from their surroundings by feedback. But your feedback should never ever be negative.
For example, say it’s a puzzle game and you want to match the alphabet, you know it is small a to larger case A. If the child has done yet, right, use encouraging words like yay, great job.
But if this is not done, right, instead of saying words like incorrect or no, use, try again, are you sure? try again, let’s do it again. Even when you are conveying a negative message put it in a positive tone.
#8 Educational in nature
And the last tip that I have for you is if you are creating products that are educational in nature, make sure that you get a few teachers at least to look at the app and to give their feedback on it.
Because teachers spend their day in and day out dealing with small children and understanding their nature and how they learn and how they interact. It is very vital that you get a teacher’s perspective on your apps as well.
You can also look at a few certifications that your app can get that label them as safe for kids to conclude more and more kids are getting on to the devices.
And this trend is just going to increase. As creators, it is our responsibility to make sure that our kids get the exposure, the entertainment, and the education that apps and products can provide but also to make sure that they are shielded from what is not to be seen.
And that we are encouraging their internal self-dialogue by providing motivational and positive feedback.
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