I’ve been building Kidz Fun Art (web, iPad & Windows) since 2021, so 4 years at time of writing. It’s a tablet optimized application intended to be used by children of all ages – my daughters were 3 and 5 when I started, and are 7 and 9 now, so I’ve seen how they use it almost daily at various ages. I’ve learned a few things about designing for their usability and how it differs from some more common patterns found in adult focused applications.
Topics Covered
Minimize Text Use
If you want kids under 8 to use your app, find a way to communicate all its primary functions with as little text as possible.
Text does not actually provide guidance to a large percentage of your user base as they can’t read it Text takes up valuable space that could be used for better graphics or aesthetically pleasing empty space Text is visually unattractive and off-putting to most children.
In the image below, note that there is not a single piece of text. While secondary and tertiary features sometimes require text, do what you can to make all primary controls text-free.
Adult focused apps often have menus where the user must know to hunt and peck for the features they need. This is not well suited to younger users. I’ve found that it works much better to design ways to co-locate tools with the objects on which they are to be used.
For example, if a user wants to select and rotate part of the image, place the control for rotating directly on or next to the selected area, not far away in a control bar or menu.
Place tools for manipulating objects directly on top of the objects, with large and obvious hit targets. Feedback from my in-house testers was that putting things like rotation controls on the border of a selected area (like most paint apps) was not a good affordance, whereas overlaying a circle on top of the object to be rotated was immediately obvious.
If the available controls cannot be shown due to space constraints, find a way to hint at their existence in a way that does not require reading or tool tips.
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