Simplify, then add delightness: On designing for children(shaneosullivan.wordpress.com) |
Simplify, then add delightness: On designing for children(shaneosullivan.wordpress.com) |
- No / bad multitouch. Children will touch the screen when holding the device and then use the other hand to perform an action. With no multitouch or focus on the first touch action the app does not register later actions and the child gets super frustrated. In addition, with very small hands it is very likely that multiple fingers touch the screen, especially the thumb if the index finger is used.
- Controls close to the edge: On many devices swiping actions close to the edge will trigger phone status menus or switching between apps. This will confuse children.
It is a pain enough for adults at times!
A related issue is how easy it is to trigger your first point (accidental multi-touch, or just accidental touch, at the side of the display due to low or zero gap from the device edge to the screen edge) on many modern devices.
All of a sudden, this delightful article about a dad creating a toy for his kids now reads like a big-tobacco eyes-only internal memo: How to hook a kid on a screen when they should be interacting with real world physical objects.
It makes me think that if they designed adult books today, they would be like children's books. One sentence in a big font and one image per page.
Doesn't have to be bad, but I worry we lose discipline and our cognitive abilities decline when everything is spoon fed.
While those might all be things 7-year-old children appreciate, they are also things my 70-year-old parents appreciate.
The main UI parts of books to learn are page numbers, tables of contents, indexes and glossaries. They're not necessarily intuitive but they are pretty universal and standardized.
The reality is that people will use the things they use the fastest. And not having to learn how to use things means people will use them more.
That is not to say that complexity does not have merits, but I say let the pendulum swing. I think we could do with a lot less in most areas still.
I read TFA because I thought some of it because some of it could be applicable to attention-deficient adults, victims of the pandemic that started before the pandemic.
Wasn't disappointed. The first observation of FTA is that children don't read, and so are adults; they don't read the docs (and forget about putting helpful info in tooltips and dialogs, they don't read them either), they read every other line in emails, etc. Unless they asked for those texts, and that may be one of the reasons why conversational AI is successful.
> Doesn't have to be bad, but I worry we lose discipline and our cognitive abilities decline when everything is spoon fed.
I think TFA is about apps with unforgiving users, so the author has to perfect the UI; he is a bona fide UI designer. I think the vast majority of applications out there don't have one. As a result the UX is generally passable at best, which adds artificial cognitive overload. You can't really blame users for taking shortcuts such as not reading. I do that, you do that, we all do that.
While easy to use softwares are more 'enjoyable' and the dopamine reward is high for small actions, it also prevent to develop some ability and resilience in navigating harder things. When the software complexity increases, users get annoyed and don't use it correctly because they were never exposed to much complexity before. (thinking about medical softwares that require many many actions to encode a patient, finance softwares, etc..)
Now, not all softwares are made to improve one efficiency. In your case, the app allows a children to express its creativity in other ways, which is very valuable also. So I think it is good that the interface and the interaction are easy, the focus should be on the creativity and not on the manipulation.
It's odd to see such nonsensical detractors here on HN.
This article can be read two different ways.
A parent making an app for their own children is wholesome and making a list of UX finds is helpful to other parents in that position.
At the same time app stores are filled with games that hook kids on with bright visuals, sound effects, and basic button mashing.
That second use case is vastly more common.
This isn't inherently bad, but does likely put a hard limit on the complexity (and dare I say, usefulness) of the tasks you can do with them.
If they get you to the complexity, fine (e.g. dialing a number to speak with a human) but also, if they're that repetitive, maybe you don't need a screen (less of this in cars, please)
- Text does not actually provide guidance to a large percentage of your user base as they can’t read it
How do kids learn to read without exposure?
- Text takes up valuable space that could be used for better graphics or aesthetically pleasing empty space
But again, how do you teach kids to read?
- Text is visually unattractive and off-putting to most children.
Nonsense - text is only visually unattractive to children because we treat them like they can’t interact with it. Text is a visual representation of language - if it’s ’offputting’ to your children, you fumbled at the goal line.
For the love of children, stop wasting neuroplasticity. By the first grade, your teachers know how much you promote the written language at home. By grade four, the damage has been done.
A lot of apps intended for mainly adult use could do well by at least considering much of this advice.
OK: "add delight"
uh huh? This seems more like it's the authors idea of what he wants children to be than how children are in reality.
Of course I read with my children every day, and they are now both voracious consumers of real world books. I encourage you to do the same. I also included features in Kidz Fun Art that help kids practice their hand writing and math problem solving. However, trying to have every app solve every need for every child (e.g. reading in this case), just leads to an ugly, messy interface that is off putting to everyone. Add lightness - take things away that are not needed.
I would however agree with the article, if we were talking about adult. Previously I worked for a webshop and good percentage of our customer could not or would not read. Sure a few have honest to god dyslexia and struggle to use you site if you use to much text, but even excluding those you'd still end up with a bunch of illiterates who will ignore any amount of text and just look at the pretty pictures and price. You might as well design certain sites for the dyslexic and avoid having to attempt to provide textual guides to morons who refuse to read but will complain at any opportunity.
We where dragged to the ombudsman for a subscription service (which I'd agree was stupid, but we never attempted to trick anyone). The case was dropped when we showed that the purchasing flow said subscription and mentioned the price at least nine times before asking for your credit card info. A number of customers apparently missed that because the lower price was tied to a subscription service.
The article is correct, but it doesn't only apply to children: "Text does not actually provide guidance to a large percentage of your user base as they can’t (won't) read it"
Kids can be much more willing to endure not understanding everything as long as there is something motivating them to go forward, in this case cool skeletons, adventure and so on.
This doesn't seem obviously wrong? If you make not being able to read blocking - children who can't read won't use it. If you make reading merely enhance the experience, now there's motivation to learn how to read?
I'm not a child psychologist or anything, or even a parent, I don't know what's best. But it's seems possible to me that this is the right balance.
It’s not that they can’t, it’s just not fun. Like when I play video games and not liking too much text before the action starts, but with shorter attention spans.
The age group included also has a lot of innocence that should be protected/balanced against future expectations, depending on where they are. There’s a lot of space and utility to letting kids be kids, they trust you more IMO when you do, making later lessons stick better. YMMV
Anecdotally, I've tried to teach my son to read from quite a young age, but it didn't work well, mainly because his brain was not ready for it (that happens often with children: they seem to not understand something despite your efforts to teach them, then suddenly, a few months later, you realize that it spontaneously clicked and they perfectly master the subject/reasoning). Then one of his friends began reading the One Piece mangas (because his older brother was reading them). Like his friend with his brother, my son became intrigued by the story and I bought him the books. That was 5.5 months ago, he had just become 7 years old. He has now reached number 38, his reading ability improved in ways I would have never imagined before. Now he's fluent in reading and started to write a kind of journal.
Qualitatively, I do consider One Piece to be poor. Not only the text, also the pictures. Still, the focus on quantity during the last months has fundamentally changed his relation to text and books. Since then, he has also read a number of other books (children novels with almost no pictures) and Belgian/French comics.
We'll see about higher quality readings later, when pleasure of reading is deeply ingrained and fear is completely gone.
If one is not confronted with text, how should one become fluent in reading and writing?
"On ne fait bien que ce qu'on fait d'habitude."/One only does well what one does usually. (Pr Philippe Boxho)
if you want quick usage a good graphic is faster than text for simple concept even in the best readers. if you have complex concepts eventually text is better but for the majority of ui text is worse than good graphics for the great reader, and many adults are not great readers.
you also shouldn't assume any language. a little effort with non text based and your app doesn't need expensive translation.
of course a learn to read app needs to provide text. However for most apps text is a sign that you didn't spend enough time in ux design.
Even if they can read, people still ignore it. Our help desk gets at least one ticket a week like "Help! Outlook doesn't work!" and it's just a pop up asking them for their password.
A scientific paper is written for a specific audience, experts in that field, and when you read many papers, it's very annoying 'easy writing' because you need to rapidly understand the meat of the paper, not being introduced again and again to your subject. Now it's more difficult to find the details that you need, if they're even written.
It makes maybe the job of a PhD easier when he start studying in the field, but I think we lost something there..
Not all fields are equal, deep learning papers are very easy to read, but also very annoying to read, too many repetitions of something that is explained in another paper, I don't need to read for the 100th time what NeRF is, only what is different in this paper compared to the previous ones. While many mathematical papers are way more dense and target the intended audience.
Increasing the page count is not really a solution either, it is a burden for the writer to continue writing easy things, and for the reader to never find the interesting parts.
On the other hand, when I read a paper that is not in my field, I appreciate the easy to read paper.
I think papers should return to dense readings by experts, but authors should also maintain blogs where the paper is simplified, and those blogs should be included in the evaluation for a PhD. In this way, if you are an expert, you get the interesting parts, and at the same time, if it is not your field, you can be introduced with many good blogs to the field.
They definitely are! We just learn them so young that we forget that we had to.
It's a feedback loop because then of course toys are designed to look more and more like toys.
Professional apps should stay professional and more time should be spent in training power users.
I'm trying not to mix with my own survivorship bias,but I tend to believe that current trends of design remove the existance of advanced users at a young age. The applications are so polished and limiting that you don't spend time trying to do complex things with them.
I find bugs in old apps were a feature for learning. If it doesn't work, you try to understand why. Curiosity is intrinsic to young children, until we remove it by giving them something that never bug or limits their possibilities.
You say "that second use case is vastly more common", however the author is very clearly aimed at the first use case. Yet you are arguing that they fall into the second.
You called a viewpoint that I share "utter nonsense". So I presented a counterpoint. A counterpoint to your opinion is neither a troll nor an attack on the original author's intent and/or character.
All I'm saying is we can both read the same article and one of us goes to build an app for their kid while the other goes and builds an app that gets other people's kids addicted to it while shoving ads. This has nothing to do with the author of the article.
Studies indicate that tech literacy is dropping, what does that entail for those moments where the more user respecting (as in more secure, preserves privacy, gives autonomy) software is inherently more complex than "user-friendly" alternatives?
What is exploitative is the way almost all supposedly child friendly apps try to trick or corrupt children with ads and gamified purchases. My post comes out very explicitly against this, which I presume you read.
I was merely responding to the kind of language you used to describe it. You call it the language of designers and engineers, but I'm sorry, that's not my language! To me, that is the language of commercial entrepreneurs and capitalists and they give me a gag reflex.
I would love for you (and everyone else) to be able to live in a world where you can pursue this kind of passion project without having to worry about “making a living”. The commercial and capitalist mindset is what's standing in your way.
Though while some designs are necessary for accessiblity, some design decisions seem to be cultural preferences: Japanese UIs tend to be information dense, and they tend to prefer it whereas some westerners would probably scream if they had to interact with it.
And yes, I too have parents of that age, and yes, they're still mentally sharp.
Voting should be weighted compared to average remaining life expectancy, for one.
https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...