UNIVERSAL USABILITY IN PRACTICE
| Introduction | Recommendations | Guidelines | Websites | Conclusions | Resources |
Children on the Internet
Dina Demner (demner@cs.umd.edu)
Department of
Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
April 2001
Introduction
Parents and teachers consider Internet to be a primarily educational/developmental tool. The Kids.net study showed that children find the Internet easy to use, and like to use it for fun, games, e-mail, chat and instant messaging. Two-thirds of the children think that it helps them with their learning, and one-third would like to use it for lessons if they were home sick from school. [13] Children also go online for learning activities that are not connected directly with school. The absence of information filters, such as editors and peer reviewing, on the Internet presents a challenge to students, who are using the web to find information for their assignments. Children cannot properly estimate the validity of the information they find on the web. They rely upon search engines and accept information in visually appealing easily accessible pages. [7] Potential exposure of children to controversial information on the web resulted in many practical guidelines on Internet safety for parents and children and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 on the Internet.[1] This act provides an official definition of a website directed to children. However, despite the abundance of web sites for kids, principles of web design for children are not yet well defined. Kids' active, extensive and rapidly growing presence on the Internet poses both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers and web designers.
- 3-5 years old pre-readers
- these children can remember and apply what they have learned a day before. They cannot separate fantasy from reality and live in preoperational world. Their attention span is 8 to 15 minutes [12]
- 5-8 years old beginning
readers
- 5 - 6 years old children form their identities, play cooperatively, develop fine motor skills. Between ages 6 and 8 child's world expands beyond the immediate surrounding [3]
- 8-12 years old children
- at 9 or 10 children begin to think in abstract terms, become more focused on interactions with others [3]
- teenagers
- teenagers like to experiment with new products, but spend less time online than adults [4]
Designing for all these age groups requires keeping in mind children and teenagers with disabilities. Presently one out of six students ages 6 to 17 (more than 5 million) have special needs. For an overview of the role of computer technology and the Internet in their education see an article by Ted S. Hasselbring and Candyce H. Williams Glaser at http://www.futureofchildren.org/cct/cct_05.pdf
Tasks domain for children can be roughly subdivided into education and entertainment. These categories tend to overlap so much that the term edutainment was coined to describe software that seeks both to entertain and educate.
Educational tasks include use by teachers for instruction during class time (66 percent of teachers in public schools), assigned research using the Internet (30 percent), complete home schooling or extracurricular courses, expert tutoring or help with homework assignments. Community Learning Network is a good place to find an Internet project for a class (http://www.cln.org/int_projects.html)
A very interesting approach to design for children is designing with children as design partners. Three design methodologies have been proposed for work with children outside the school environment: contextual inquiry, technology immersion, and participatory design.[2] World Kids Network is an attempt to implement this approach on the web. It describes itself as an ongoing project, rather than a website. 80 percent of it is created and maintained by children. (http://www.worldkids.net/)
Webmonkey for kids suggests helping kids with their first steps in web design. This tool and some practical advice from teachers, who are using it in their classrooms can be found at http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/kids/
CNET Builder.com [14] proposes ten key dos and don'ts of web design for children
- Do: Know your target audience
- Define the age range of the target audience
- Do: Include interaction
- Offer chat rooms, e-mail, discussion groups, collaborative storytelling; a possibility to customize the site: change the computer's wallpaper, layout; interactive games
- Do: Be careful with private info
- Tell children and their parents what information you collect and why. Commercial sites need parental consent before collecting personal information from children 12 years old or younger. [1]
- Do: Test with kids
- Find representative children and ask them to perform typical tasks or just watch how they use the site
- Do: Use characters
- Characters can present useful, but boring information in a fun easy to learn way
- Don't: Be lame
- Don't be afraid to address complicated issues, don't be condescending or boring
- Don't: Rely on tired design
metaphors
- Use straightforward icons and obvious category names for navigation
- Don't: Neglect your content
- Present quality information, update it regularly and change the layout
- Don't: Even start if you don't love kids
- Don't: Forget to check out other stuff for kids
Contextual Inquiry with children
- Observe children in their own rooms or other familiar to them places
- Give children time
- Wear informal clothing
- Do not stand with young children. Rather than being an authority or outsider, be one of the kids
- Use an object, such as computer, as a bridge to develop relationship
- Ask about their opinions and feelings, show that you need their help
- Use informal language
- The interactor must not take notes
- Note-taking should be very discreet. Use small notepads
- Note-takers must become a background nonmoving part of the environment
- Give children unlimited time, access to technology-rich environment and freedom of choice to find out what children do and want.
- 7-10 years old children are ideal partners
- Two or three adults with three to four children form an ideal team
- Adult-to-adult interaction is as important as adult-to-child and child-to-child interaction
- Use diverse low-tech prototyping tools: crayons, paper, LEGO blocks, etc.
- Freely combine this tools
- Introduce low-tech prototyping tools as early as possible
- Children open up faster to informal and playful adults
- Goals should be flexible
Activities:
- Design activities to be inherently interesting and challenging
- Design activities to allow for expanding complexity and support children as they move from one level to the next
- Design supportive reward structures that take children's developmental level and context of use into account
- Present instructions in an age-appropriate format
- Design instructions to be easy to comprehend and remember
- On-screen character interventions should be supportive rather than distracting
- Allow children to control access to information
Screen Layout
- Design icons to be visually meaningful
to children
- The best icons are easily recognizable, look clickable and are at least size of a quarter
- Use cursor design to help communicate functionality
- Use rollover audio, animation and highlighting to indicate functionality
On the other hand several sites might be used by children directly, or with a little help from a parent. 123 Sesame Street online is a great web site for children that very thoughtfully implements many of the mentioned before guidelines. This and other toddlers' and preschoolers' websites help parents to enhance creativity in children and offer an excellent opportunity to spend time together. Some of the sites have very nice ideas and great implementation in general, but can cause frustration because of little details. For example, Tool Shed Trouble at NickJr.com is a great idea to teach kids tool names and develop fine motor skills. In this game children have to pick up a tool and place it into its slot, but the 'hot' areas seem to be much smaller than the tool shapes, moreover these areas are often obscured by text balloons.
All good sites for under-ten kids offer coloring pages, music, stories and games. Coloring pages range from very simple ones, where one mouse click randomly changes one detail, to somewhat creative, where kids can select colors (Coloring 4 Kids), to more complicated, where fine motor skills are needed (Arthur: D.W.'s Art Studio). Yahooligans! is a good site for older children to explore on their own. MaMaMedia.com offers very good examples of interaction and visually appealing regularly changing environment. Although Lycos Zone is a great award winning site, it lacks originality. For example it reuses the Sesame Street's site map.
