1. Rewarding Experience
Rewards are moments when users recognize their efforts and achievements.
Why give users rewards?
Reward is a tool that guides young users through the experience while satisfying them and keeping them coming back often.
How should we reward users? ?
Simple Rewards
The enthusiasm reinforcement and guidance provided by rewards is very important. These rewards don't always need to be generous. When we choose a character, it can be as simple as a cute little animation. Where appropriate, reward users for every interaction, no matter how small.
Tailored Rewards
The reward should change over time. The challenge for babies is to grasp objects with their hands, so they should be given basic interactive rewards. They are unlikely to understand the concepts of scoring and performance.
2. Moments of Surprise
Surprise refers to exciting unexpected or surprising events for children to experience.
Why use surprise?
Our brains are born with surprises, and children enjoy surprises just like adults.
Surprise adds variety and depth to games and applications that need to ensure a safe environment.
Surprise creates an element of pleasure, and improves the "replay value" and participation by reducing the same. As long as these inconsistent elements are positive, the experience may have more results and make users feel more changeable and enjoyable.
The game needs to be intuitive for children, but in order to provide elements of surprise and joy, the results of the game should be different. If the player can see the state of the game and always know what to do next and what to expect, the game will quickly lose its challenges and become boring.
How to use surprise? ?
Look for opportunities to enrich the happy elements of the experience. Make a button fluctuate, or let the cartoon character run around on the screen, mess things up... turn the ordinary into a magical magic.
Create a bit of disruption to the experience or game in a positive way, don’t be afraid that it will become chaotic. It is a good way to let non-functional elements behave in unexpected ways. This adds tension and excitement to a good experience, an unknown stimulus.
3. Challenge & Balance Challenge & Balance
Challenge refers to the difficulty or number of skills involved in the player's progress through the game experience.
Why is there a challenge?
Very young children are more satisfied with experience rather than challenge. Older children hope that the challenge can be part of the experience. An experience that has a large challenge and few rewards is a failure. Similarly, the experience of challenging small rewards and small rewards is also a failure.
When designing experiences for children, it is crucial to formulate appropriate challenges after careful consideration.
How can we implement the challenge?
For users of any age, we all want to challenge their abilities, but we don’t want impossible situations or unfair obstacles.
For the younger CBeebies (an early childhood education channel of the BBC) children in the age group (2-6 years old), the challenge should be an obvious task that can be accomplished, while providing positive feedback on the user's efforts and participation. Loop feedback is very important when guiding users and helps guide them through the entire experience.
For children of CBBC Oxford University age (6 years old and above), use challenging content and balanced rewards to provide stimulation for mastering skills. As challenges and difficulties increase, along with adequate rewards and measures, let users share their successes and learn from failures.
4. Delightful Interactions
The feedback and responsiveness of buttons and game elements makes our apps and games alive.
Why make the interaction pleasurable?
Feedback helps users understand what happened, why this happened and what can be done next. For younger children, who have less experience of the world around them, it is very important to provide clear feedback in order for them to understand how things work. Children need quick feedback. If they do not receive feedback, they are likely to be distracted.
How to make the interaction pleasurable?
Use clearly defined point states and animations, accompanied by audio so that users can feel every action they do.
5. Natural Discovery
Children like to explore and discover new things through games. Based on children's natural curiosity, create an interesting world and let them try new things without worrying about getting lost.
Why design natural exploration methods?
If you have seen a child open a new toy, you will find that they rarely read the instructions. So think of your experience design as a toy, and children should be able to start playing with their hands.
Children open apps and games for fun, so make content the focus.
Overly complex vision will override everything, let alone children who cannot process visual information as quickly as adults.
How to design natural exploration methods?
For software developed for children who are illiterate or who are just beginning to learn, the visual representation in the user interface interaction is an important factor in its success.
Icons should be designed for children to represent actions or objects in a way that they can recognize. Icons need to be distinguished from each other and the background of the interface, so that children can perceive that these icons are interactive. In addition to completing the task, do not add additional visual complexity.
Complex tasks
Reduce the complexity of the user interface, make the experience simple and clear, and make children happy to explore.
One way to deal with visual complexity is to use a multi-layer strategy. First present a small number of operations and objects to the children, and then wait for them to use them proficiently before continuing to add other operations and objects to the interface.
If they get lost in the task, provide useful hints based on the current situation. When they can figure out what to do on their own, the task will be more rewarding.
Transitions
Transition helps users understand the changes in the relationship between elements. Showing the transition path between the two scenarios can help our young users more easily find where they are, where they are coming from, and where they are going.
Make sure that each transition helps children build clues to let them know where and why they are there.
Try to clearly show the result of the operation. If clicking on a UI element will cause some changes, please highlight this element.
6. Forgiving Design
Create a happy experience, allow mistakes to occur, and prevent users from being punished or confused for making mistakes.
Why design fault tolerance?
Children are still learning motor skills and lack precise motor skills. If you consider this in your design, you can avoid the potential for children to be frustrated by unintentional behavior or mistakes.
How to do fault-tolerant design?
Using a larger click hot zone, all interactive elements have a minimum size of 64 pixels (based on a medium-density screen) and 9.6mm. This means that interactive elements have enough room for fault tolerance to adapt to the accuracy of children's operations. Although the click hot zone is large, the underlying graphics does not necessarily have to be that large. It should be visually purposeful, but not bulky.
Sufficient forgiveness in drag targets
For a child, there are few things that frustrate him like a thing that does not work as it should. For example, dragging apples into the basket should be easy for young children. But if the target area that Apple needs to be dragged into lacks room for fault tolerance, he is likely to be punished because of his lack of fine motor ability.
By expanding the size of the response hot zone of the drag target beyond the basic graphics, to ensure sufficient fault tolerance space.
Reversibility
Reversible operations are important to encourage exploration. Allow the child to withdraw from an action and give him the confidence to continue.
7. Give animation personality Animation with Personality
Add personality to the animation to help convey a wider range of emotions-from drama to humor, resulting in a pleasant, playful and rewarding experience.
Why add personality to animation?
Featureless or poor-quality animations can negatively impact the immersive experience.
How to add personality to the animation?
Based on the movement of objects in the real world, physical weight and inertia are used in animation. By adding some exaggeration techniques on this basis, you can create charming animations and make the design more humane. Using curves or arcs in animation can make your animation more natural, unless you deliberately want to create a sense of mechanics.
8. Immersive Audio
Sound is a powerful tool for conveying meaning for interactive elements and content. It enhances design to create experience. For children with visual impairments, it can help create the world.
Why do I need immersive sound?
Audio and sound effects can successfully convey emotions as visually. It can also help shape the user experience by acting as a confirmation tone for status changes.
For children with sensory impairment, cognitive or learning difficulties, rich and harmonious sound feedback helps them understand and enjoy it. Achieving good immersive sound effects can open up a new world for visually impaired children, so they can use voice prompts to play games independently or navigate UI.
How to design immersive sound effects?
Associate sound effects with UI elements to help cognitive understanding.
Provide a sound equivalent to any transition state, such as loading or scene switching.
You need to be cautious when determining the pitch and make sure that repeated playback is not annoying.
Use sound design to describe environmental changes, such as from gravel to grass, reverberation in large enclosed spaces, and sounds related to the distance of objects.
Use background music to immerse the user in the experience. The background sound should convey experience information according to the pitch and speed of the music to ensure that the music is editable. Keep background noise and music to a minimum during the conversation.
9. Consistent attractiveness and realism
Consistently Captivating & Authentic
Smooth the edges of the experience through consistent visual design and real sound, creating a constant sense of surprise. "You didn't notice the box in Disneyland"
Why is consistent attractiveness and realism important?
The participation experience can be increased by ensuring that there are no conflicting communication elements.
How to be consistently attractive and realistic?
Consistent styling
Visual design and illustration can take many forms. The important thing is that every visual element should be perceived as belonging to the same world as the original design intention.
Visual focus
Young children cannot process visual information as quickly as adults, so bold and simple visual effects may be more advantageous than complicated designs that are too cumbersome and difficult to maintain. Try to make sure that the points of visual interest on each screen are highlighted.
Character lead
Children are easily driven and joined by cartoon character images. Use characters to pull children into the world you create.
Tone of voice
Vibration or inconsistent intonation can cause confusion, especially for children who are unable to perceive tone from facial expressions.
All conversations should conform to the tone of the brand.
The use of text
It should be used as little as possible, especially for children who are not literate, unless the purpose is to teach reading and writing.
Using any or all of these principles when designing for children, you will create a convincing, enjoyable and inclusive experience for children to a certain extent.
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