How to Balance Design Guidelines for Children

Table 2 shows some design guidelines for these developmental categories from Debra Levin Gelman’s Design For Kids.

With all of the different needs of children at various stages of development, how can we expect design guidelines to fit all of them?

Evolving Design Guidelines

Let’s examine these guidelines from a slightly different perspective. On a recent project for the formal-operations crowd, the desired user experience needed to

• have a low barrier to entry—steering clear of personal questions up front
• allow users to navigate their selected path
• establish trust in the information, so users would be willing to share more

In Table 3, let’s take a look at how these requirements might need to change if the product had to address various age groups.

This example shows how guidelines can evolve to match the needs of specific age groups.

How well do products that are currently on the market address the needs of these developmental groups?

Some Hypothetical Design Guidelines

Now, let’s look at a game, an app, and a toy. We’ll determine some hypothetical design guidelines from a high-level description of each product, then compare these guidelines to the actual product and see how well it does.

Game: Minecraft

Minecraft, shown in Figure 1, is a hugely popular game among the younger crowd. It’s a first person–player game in a world that allows users to build anything they want from the materials they find. It’s like having unlimited numbers of different types of Lego blocks. While some parents let their 6 year olds play the game, it’s supposed to be for older kids—how old depends on the regional rating system in force. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) says Minecraft is for children who are 10 and up, while the Pan European Game Information (PEGI) says it’s for children who are 7 and older.

My understanding is that Minecraft was designed to emulate other first-person games, but with a more open-ended environment allowing greater creativity. Minecraft has evolved from that initial idea, but the fundamental activities are still building things and discovering how others build things. Game mechanics can become very complex, so let's keep our quick analysis at a very high level. 

Given this understanding, our hypothetical guidelines would be as follows:

• Introduce the world through clear instructions and provide simple, discernible goals.
• Offer rewards for completing constructions.
• Allow for silliness in constructions.
• Provide contextual Help if a construction doesn’t work.

How well does Minecraft fulfill these guidelines?

Photo by Kevin Jarrett, on Flickr

Minecraft does not do a great job of giving instructions. It throws users into the deep end, assumes they know how to operate a first-person game, and makes them figure out how to play the game on their own. While Minecraft does allow users to learn outside the multiplayer environment, instructions and contextual Help are not really part of the game. Yet, it is an extremely successful game for kids. Of course, plenty of products have been successful despite bad user experiences.

What the game does exceedingly well is allowing silliness—in constructs, behavior, and general gameplay. Since Minecraft provides an open world in which users can build things, its strengths are clearly in promoting creativity. Rewards for completing constructions come into play only once they’re complete. The game offers no rewards in advance, beyond the possibility of peer acknowledgment.

Since Minecraft did not do a great job of meeting these guidelines, it could definitely be improved upon in the future.

App: Blue Hat, Green Hat

Boynton books are extremely well established in the toddler universe. Their apps are perhaps less well known, but they generally get favorable reviews. Boynton Moo Media produces them in conjunction with Loud Crow Interactive. These books are “Rated 4+, Made for Ages 5 and Under.” While that confusing statement would likely make anyone think it’s only for 4 and 5 year olds, the subject matter is clearly for kids 2 and over. With this in mind, let’s speculate about the design guidelines that should have applied in making the Blue Hat, Green Hat app, which is shown in Figure 3.

So, what is this app? It's an entertainment and education app for 2–6 year olds. It’s an interactive book that children can read—or just play with if they haven’t yet learned to read. Thus, our hypothetical design guidelines that the design needs to address are the following:

• Balance engagement and education.
• Provide clear, manageable, chunked instructions with icons that guide the user into the book
• Highlight areas with which the user can interact, including page turns.
• Provide a familiar experience that is similar to the book.

How does the actual Blue Hat, Green Hat app, shown in Figure 4, check out?

The app’s initial screen can be a little confusing to users. The main interactivity is the user’s deciding whether the app should read the book aloud. The icons for this are pretty good—a bear reading a book aloud or silently. But after that, the app does really well. The digital book looks almost exactly like the physical book, but provides interactivity by highlighting what word it’s reading—thus, capturing the user’s attention, while educating—or through slight animations throughout all pages.

Blue Hat, Green Hat did pretty well in satisfying our hypothetical guidelines. The one thing that’s missing is chunked instructions. But, in this case, familiarity with the material might compensate for that lack.

Toy: The Boogie Board

The other objects I’ve examined have digital interfaces. The Boogie Board is a pseudo tablet that has an LCD screen and a stylus for drawing. A user can draw on it, then tap a button to clear what’s on the tablet. The product’s packaging, shown in Figure 5, doesn’t say it’s for kids, but the images on it show kids using the tablet.

How should we categorize this toy? It fits the bill for arts and crafts, and any person who can hold a stylus could use it, as shown in Figure 6. So the design needs to address the following requirements:

• Engage the user and enable creativity.
• Provide a clear visual indicator for erasing.
• Let the user work with simple, easily discernible colors.
• Support drawing and clearly display the image the user creates.

So, how did the Boogie Board do? The simplicity of the device, which looks similar to a tablet, engages users and encourages them to draw. While users can draw in only one color, the color leaps off the pad. The lack of color options keeps the user interface simple. On the other hand, while there is only one button, there is no indication of what that button does.

The Boogie Board met the guidelines pretty well, but the eraser button would certainly benefit from an icon. There is a fine balance between imitating a popular product and creating the user experience that is best for users.

Getting Design Guidelines Right

While getting your design guidelines right can be tricky, it’s hugely important because guidelines are the springboard to successful product design. To ensure that a user experience accommodates all potential users, take a step back and make sure your design guidelines address the needs of users at different developmental stages—and with different cognitive abilities, but that’s an article for another day. Applying design guidelines can be tricky, as these examples have demonstrated. That’s why testing and iterating your designs is always a good idea. Designing for children just requires a little extra thought—and you don’t actually have to have kids to give it a try!