Usability Heuristic: Education Apps for Kids

If you do not come from the UX design, the term usability heuristic may sound unfamiliar to you, or you could hardly tell what it means in literal. In fact, the usability heuristic is a great tool in understanding and figuring out the usability issues of the design. Heuristic is the method first raised by Jakob Nielsen which covers 10 general principles for interaction design.

These principles are called “heuristics” because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines. — Nielson Norman Group

The closure of schools these days has left many kids staying at home and they are with more opportunities to explore the educational apps. There are many articles that sum up the useful resources available for kids to stay educationally engaged amid school closures. The post today will analyze some of these educational apps from the UX design’s angel, by applying 4 selected usability heuristics to see how well they perform. The 3 apps we cover here are: Homer, Khan Kids and Speech Tour Pro, they all aim to help elementary school students to learn the ABCs, phonics, and sight words and practice their reading skills.

10 Principles of usability heuristic — mindmap tool: Miro

This article will not cover each of the usability heuristics but select 3 principles that best matching the education apps for kids. It does not mean the other principles are not important but simply would like to focus on these few first.

Visibility of system status

The design should keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time. It does not mean the need to tell the user everything the system is doing, and it can be feedback only shows after the user has done something. This is extremely important for the educational apps for kids.

It’s always better to provide some sort of “physical” feedback to their taps. Sounds are also a great addition in terms of feedback. — Rubens Cantuni

The characters are running to tell the kids the system is loading — Khan Kids

Match between system and the real world

In the book of The Design of Everyday Things, there is an important rule call “Mapping”, Mapping is about having a clear relationship between controls and the effect they have on the world and a good mapping ensures the user feels as natural as possible. Same here, a good UX design should speak the user’s language and follow real-world conventions.

The interface simulates the coloring scenario kids have in real life — Khan Kids

Consistency and standards

It is crucial for ensuring that the UI is predictable and learnable. The consistency can refer to internal consistency and external consistency according to the Nielson Norman Group. Internal consistency requires maintaining consistency within a product or family of products and external consistency is to keep the consistency outside of products. The skills and experiences people gained from other sites should e transferable to your app. If all of those other sites follow a consistent convention, but your site breaks that convention, you force people to learn something new, this will add your user cognitive load, you should only do it when it’s absolutely necessary.

Buttons are not the standard, without adults’ help, kids unsure where to start. — Speech Tour

Error prevention

In designing the apps for kids, should also fully take into the kids physical development into consideration. Rubens Cantuni, who is also the expert in kids’ app design, pointed out that the kids don’t have the dexterity and muscular control of an adult in their hands/fingers. Therefore, the UI element should be bigger than normal and have enough space to prevent the involuntary tap. What’s more, set some constraints in interacting with the app is also workable.

The button only clickable after the reading is completed. — Khan Kids

Grown-up page request password to enter — Homer Reading

Recap

The usability heuristic is a useful method in identifying usability problems in a product. All given principle is never mean to be a dogma, you should always efficiently apply that based on what you encounter in the evaluation. I attached my evaluation report and you could find more details to apply the principles in analyzing the apps. I hope this was a helpful article to let you know about the usability heuristic especially incorporating the education apps for kid. Thank you for reading!