How to build toddler app UIs.
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
It amazes me how often apps built for toddlers make fundamental mistakes: interactions that little, fat 'starfishy' fingers can't manage; instructions in text rather than voice or picture.
Flash games are the worst for this: at least with an iOS game drag and drop is easy and intuitive for a toddler - but trying to drag and drop with a laggy mouse is hard. Toddler will accidentally scroll the containing browser window or switch apps, which is very distressing for them. A simple, locked full-screen browser would be a godsend for many parents (which is what an iPad is).
I have found young children cope fine with the one button. Once they learn not to touch it until they are finished they are fine - if they accidentally push it they know what happened.
It's also great to see quality, intelligent software appearing for small children: Balloonimals is a constant favourite, Ramp Champ should be rebranded for the under-5s as it has just enough gameplay for them.
Something interesting: as my kids (6 & 8) have grown up playing iPhone games with tilt control they get very frustrated when they play games with button-only control. They naturally try to tilt the device. It shows that the next generation of gamers have no need for physical buttons - something that we were told was essential for gamers.
I've been meaning to write a blog post about this subject for years.
Having put so much research and effort into getting their programming right it's sad that they could be so slap-dash with their online content.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/behind...
It's also a bit premature to draw conclusions from kids at an age where their fine motor skills are still developing. They could be getting frustrated because pushing buttons is hard for them.
From the article:
"Finally, here are some gripes with iOS:
•Home button needs an off switch. I need some way to disable the home button or make it harder to access during app play, e.g. a triple click or some other morse code sequence.
•Need a way to hide videos. Eli knows how to get to the videos. He can find the icon no matter where I put it. I can disable videos through restrictions, but that doesn't really solve the problem. I would really like to be able to hide this icon like you can do for system icons on Windows. Another option would be to put the restriction on the icon itself and force me to enter the password when clicking on it. Come to think of it, this would work for the home button too. "
I very much disagree with the first point. It makes your app a 'trap' that even an adult might not be able to figure out how to exit from. This is a stunningly, spectacularly bad idea and violates the whole "the user is in control" illusion. If the easiest way to exit your app is to reboot the machine ... then your app blows, and you suck.
If the kid is pressing the home button a lot, and this annoys you, then you have to think about your goals. Toddlers like to bounce from one thing to another a lot, and they love to be in control (because they have so little control of everything else in their lives).
We think of toddlers having short attention spans, but sometimes the converse is true, toddlers can also have amazingly long attention spans - the classic example being the kid who sits there and bangs a pot with a wooden spoon for endless hours.
If the toddler is exiting too often from the app, maybe the problem is not with the home button, maybe your app is just not engaging enough.
I saw (for instance) one toddler who could spend hours making the angry birds fly the wrong way. When they do they make indignant squawks, and he loved that. Without fail any adult who watched him doing that would quickly become bored and try to show him how to 'do it right'.
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With respect to the videos, I'm not sure what the problem is, is it bandwidth? Is it easy access to age inappropriate content?
Mis-timing or missing a double-click to adjust the brightness or pause/adjust background music exiting causing the exit to completely exit can be annoying at times, and I'm not even a toddler :)
Wrt to videos, left to own devices, the toddler will often just watch videos, and I'd rather them interact with the apps when it is not video time. When the icon is not there/found, that works fine.
Ok, thanks. I haven't had videos loaded on the iPad, so this hasn't come up during my field testing.
Maybe there's a niche to make toddler videos? Actually, I think there is something much more subtle and fundamental going on here that I will need to think about. When they are driving the app, the toddler is very 'switched on' and they want everything to be clickable and interactable... yet according to what you're saying they switch over into a totally passive mode when watching videos. Fascinating, but begs the question "now that I know that, what do I do?" :D
My two-year-old does the same thing. He loves the sounds the birds make, but he gets very upset when the pigs "fall down," so he'll throw the all of the birds the wrong way, go back to the main screen, choose the next level (that I've already unlocked), and fling all of those birds the wrong way too.
Rovio should come out with a toddler-focused game that just lets the user fling an unlimited number of birds into random targets. I'd buy it.
I got my son an ipod touch when he was about 18 months old so he could watch movies on long car rides. All the points mentioned are dead on from my perspective. I'd also add two points:
- don't rely on audio instructions. a parent noticing that a toddler is getting frustrated may not have heard the "pick the thing with the same initial sound" instruction. Put the text on the screen. - the best upsell is more content. Toddler Teasers Shapes does this really well. They built a complete and engaging game, and offer upsells of more content like colors and letters in the same game format.
Actually, toddler teasers does the whole experience really well. The splash screen has text "triple click to access settings" and only one big button at the bottom that says "play". The additional content is accessed through the settings screen.
Red vs green us also something that kids get early. They know about traffic lights and trains (apart from the 10% of colour-blind boys).
It's writing that they find frustrating. Writing should be left for over 6s. I've seen learn-the-alphabet (flash) apps with textual buttons!
My two-year-old twins love watching Sesame Street videos, but this afternoon they managed to pull up a woman in underwear talking about sex off the 'most popular' tab.
iPad apps and other forms of educational software, DVDs, CD-ROMs, electronic, interactive toys are all just bullshit paraphrenalia that pile up in the garage.
Babies need interaction with humans, and real world objects. Toddler apps on the iPad are poison.
As for our kids, we found that the TV is amazingly effective at teaching them, notably for reading skills. That catchy "The B says 'Buh'" song (and its 25 friends) was something that totally helped them remember how to sound out words. Our eight year old reads like a demon now, and the five year old is a beginning reader (he started slower than his older brother, but he's doing fine). The current three year old is recognizing letters and clearly interested in reading on her own.
It's not like we don't read to them or teach them, too--but it's quite obvious to us that the TV is scarily effective at getting messages across. If you think about it, that's what it's designed to do. We just choose to use it primarily for good and limit the undesirable effects.
Oh, and you should totally see my daughter figure out tangram puzzles on the iphone/ipod. She rocks at it. Yeah, they like to do stuff that's not challenging, too (come to think of it, I do too sometimes!). But I'm the parent: I get a say into how this stuff is used, and I'm going to use every tool that I can.
This extends quite naturally to conversations about sugar and, later on, alcohol. Children don't need sugary foods and sweets, there is absolutely no advantage in them, so why would I feed them to my child? When she's old enough to want a mobile phone because all the other kids have them and they're cool, the question is "why do you need a mobile phone?". Just because everyone else has them is not an acceptable reason.
Computers are designed to be learned, and it's easy to learn how to use a computer (especially something that's basically designed for the "normals" like the iPad). Hell when computers first came out plenty of non-technical professionals learned to use them in a very short period of time. I don't think there's any advantage, educational or otherwise, in exposing my daughter to that type of technology early on, so why would I? Simply because it's there?
I harbour certain reservations to do with development of imagination and fostering an early screen addiction (just the same as I'm concerned about sugar and alcohol addiction) that come into play here - but those aren't things that I can point at and conclusively say "if my daughter uses this, she'll be an obese xbox obsessed couch potato", but the reasoning of minimalist parenting and focusing on needs rather than wants I think builds a healthier child.
The "love playing with them" seems to apply to sweets too. Kids love sweets. I love sweets. They're not the healthy part of the diet, but that's why they're intake-limited, not unmetered.
Mobile phones are useful too. When I was a kid, I was terrible about phoning home to let them know whose house I was playing at. Knowing that a kid has a mobile phone that you can reach them on is awesome. The other (cool?) stuff can just be a fringe perk for the kid.
So, I dunno. The alternative to minimalism isn't maximalism. Things like access to highly-attractive, disproportionately rewarding relative to their merits activities can be rationed. But I just don't see not letting a kid play with things that they think are awesome just because if they were to overdo it makes it harmful.
Indeed, the concept of self-metering is huge. I've never seen kids explode quite so spectacularly as when they are released from a restrictive regime into an environment where they have not learned the habits of self control.
Simple interfaces with big buttons, modal dialogs always fixed position in the middle of the screen, and bold colors are the future.
The best toddler friendly games that I know is http://www.fungooms.com with a toddler you need to "copilot" with the mouse/touch but if these kind of games goes to a touchscreen they will be a big success.
Other recomendation is using webcam games to recognize the toddler movement.
* Design for right-to-left action, so that when kids tap the screen with the pointer finger of their (most likely) right hand, the rest of their hand doesn't hide the screen. I'm still not sure why so many apps are built left-to-right...
* There are no popups, menus or screens changes for kids to get lost in. Anywhere they can touch the screen, something fun happens.
* Settings are hidden away in the lame phone-wide settings, so that kids don't land in there by accident.
TowerSmash, 99c - http://itunes.apple.com/app/towersmash/id293910534?mt=8
Agreed, but even better would be a way to limit users to a certain folder or screen. I keep all the kid-friendly apps on one screen, but inevitably they go exploring. I'm always worried that they'll send gobbledygook to an email, or a status update on twitter or facebook. It'd be great to separate these apps.
For that matter, it's too easy to swipe to another screen. My youngest finds the app he wants, but he'll try 4-5 times to click the icon, and end up partially swiping to another screen.
It's also too easy to go into edit mode. My oldest has figured ou that when it goes all wiggly, to press the home button, but my youngest just gets frustrated that he can't start a wiggling app.
Also it would be very useful if iOS had a "toddler switch" which would allow to
1) Disable home screen updates. This is very annoying, often I've a bunch of my apps rearranged or even deleted by my toddler
2) Disable some apps
3) Any app can read this flag to alter functionality
4) Make home button harder to activate - for example it needs to be pressed together with some gesture on screen.
1) toddlers and up just instantly get simple touch screen UIs. They are way more intuitive for them. 2) Free apps for small children that have adverts are a daft idea. Way too many fat-fingered mis-presses by children (unless that is the idea....)
Let me know if you have any suggestions for this.