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eBook - ePub
Design For Kids
Digital Products for Playing and Learning
Debra Levin Gelman
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- 248 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Design For Kids
Digital Products for Playing and Learning
Debra Levin Gelman
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About This Book
Emotion. Ego. Impatience. Stubbornness. Characteristics like these make creating sites and apps for kids a daunting proposition. However, with a bit of knowledge, you can design experiences that help children think, play, and learn. With Design for Kids, you'll learn how to create digital products for today's connected generation.
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![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f0xvi-01-plgo-compressed.webp)
CHAPTER 1
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f0001-01-plgo-compressed.webp)
Kids and Design
Designing for Kids, ThenâŚ
âŚAnd Now
The Good and Bad News
Savannah W., Age 3
You canât stop the future.
You canât rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.
âJay Asher
Thirty years ago, computers were rare, special, fragile machines that kids got to play with for a few hours a week during computer time at school. Now they are ubiquitous, gracing desktops, counters, and classrooms across the globe. Twenty years ago, children were given floppy disks and monitored closely as they learned BASIC and played games. Today, theyâre handed laptops and tablets and allowed to explore freely. Ten years ago, fear of the unknown had kids shying away from this thing called the World Wide Web. Now, children are boldly tackling the Webâin addition to apps, social media, and MMORPGsâwith little to no fear holding them back.
This generation of kids is digitally native, meaning that technology has and always will be a part of their lives. Unlike previous generations, these digital natives believe that technology exists to serve them, instead of the other way around. They have always known âresetâ and âundoâ and âplay again.â They see technology as a tool for expression, experimentation, and communication. And designing for these little people is more challenging and more exciting than itâs ever been before.
Letâs take a look at what it meant to design for kids back when the Internet was a child and what it means now that the Internet is well into its adolescence.
Designing for Kids, ThenâŚ
The first childrenâs website I ever designed was back in 1998 for Georgia Public Television. It was a companion site for a TV show called Salsa, which taught preschool kids basic Spanish. The website had yellow text on a dark green background, a few animated gifs, some really choppy videos, and a game that I had cobbled together in Shockwave (see Figure 1.1). The navigation was complicated, and there was way too much instructional copy. But I was proud of it, and it even won a public-television award for âBest of the Webâ or something like that.
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f01-01-plgo-compressed.webp)
FIGURE 1.1
A screenshot from my first kidsâ site, circa 1998.
The show Salsa is still around, but the website is long gone. Back in the early days of the Web, we designed websites for kids just like we designed them for adults. The differences were that we used a lot more pictures, a lot more color, and bumped up the font size a few more points. We figured that âbiggerâ meant it would appeal more to children. True, we were limited by modem speeds, Web-safe colors, and smaller monitors, but, constraints aside, we didnât really challenge ourselves to think of different and better ways to approach designing websites specifically for kids.
In fact, quite the opposite was true. We were concerned with keeping kids away from the Web and protecting them from the sudden onslaught of unmoderated news, pictures, and information surging into our homes from all over the world. While âeducationalâ sites were cropping up all over the place, the assumption was that theyâd be used alongside a responsible adult who could help navigate the difficult and rocky terrain. Because kids couldnât be trusted with this crazy, scary new technology.
NOTE MORE THAN JUST PICTURES AND COLORS
Sites for children have been around since the Web was in its infancy, but itâs only in the past 10 years that weâve seen a strong focus on designing for kidsâ unique cognitive, motor, technical, and emotional skills.
Figure 1.2 shows a perfect example and prototypical turn-of-the-century kidsâ website called Enchanted Learning, which was meant to be used with parent or teacher assistance. This site featured some interesting educational content for kids, but the antiquated design, overuse of color, limited grid, and tiny images made it difficult for children to understand and use. However, when the site was first created in 1996, it represented the best that we had to offer young people in terms of digital design. Those were the days before Flash, when interactivity and engagement were limited, and we assumed that all our users could read, use a mouse, and had the patience to wait for a bunch of pictures to download. Boy, were we ever wrong!
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f01-02-plgo-compressed.webp)
FIGURE 1.2
Enchanted Learning is a typical kidsâ website from the mid-1990s.
âŚAnd Now
Now, fortunately, we know better. Advances in technology, a deeper understanding of how kids use this technology, and a greater sense of comfort and trust have given us a broader toolkit with which to work and design. So the result is a renewed commitment to designing top-notch experiences for kids, as evidenced by Appleâs new app-store âKidsâ category, as well as exciting, cross-channel experiences that bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual. Weâre starting to realize that we need to maximize the time that children spend using technology so that it truly meets their cognitive, developmental, emotional, and intellectual needs. But, as youâll soon see, there is still a lot of work remaining to be done.
Just for comparisonâs sake between then and now, letâs look at DIY, an example of what a great new digital experience for kids entails today.
DIY is a website (with a companion app) that is really and truly for kids. Its judicious use of color, its large, touchable buttons, and its straightforward navigation and flow make DIY a great omni-channel experience for children and their ever-evolving cognitive abilities. DIY enables kids to find creative projects online, which they can then create âin the real worldâ and go back and share with their digital community. DIY maps perfectly to how kids ages 6 and up like to use technologyâto browse, to sort, to filter, and to support the activities they do in the real world. Younger kids have a harder time separating what they do in a physical space from what they do in a digital one, and DIYâs seamless cross-channel presence makes this separation all but unnecessary (see Figure 1.3).
In addition to a clear, strongly executed creative design, DIY uses interaction-design patterns that work perfectly for kids under 12. Straightforward flows, lots of options to choose from presented in a manageable and understandable format, and obvious navigation help kids know exactly what the site is for and how to use it. Weâll look at more examples like this one throughout the book.
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f01-03-plgo-compressed.webp)
FIGURE 1.3
DIY is a cross-channel experience that represents the new direction in digital design for kids.
The Good and Bad News
The good news is that weâre seeing more and more sites and apps like DIY that are available for kids today. The bad news is that weâre not seeing enough of them. There are still far too many mediocre experiences for kids out thereâapps, sites, games, even toysâthrown together with little to no regard for how children learn and play. As designers, we have a tremendous, untapped opportunity and responsibility to design great experiences for kids.
The Council on Communications and Media1 reported the results of a study conducted in October 2013, which found that children in the United States average about eight hours of screen time a day, including TV, video games, websites, and mobile devices. While weâre not looking to increase those hours, our goal as designers should be to improve the quality of childrenâs apps by creating better interfaces, better experiences, better content, and better tools for them. This book is designed to help you do just that. So letâs jump in and start learning about kids and design.
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f0008-01-plgo-compressed.webp)
CHAPTER 2
![image](https://book-extracts.perlego.com/1257079/images/f0009-01-plgo-compressed.webp)
Playing and Learning
So Which Is It? Playing or Learning?
Designing for Kids vs. Designing for Adults
The Similarities Between Kids and Adults
A Framework for Digital Design
Chapter Checklist
Clara, Age 8
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a
year of conversation.
âPlato
At a 4-year-oldâs birthday party, I had an interesting conversation with two different parents about their childrenâs iPad use versus their TV watching. I asked about the rules these parents had in place regarding screen time for their kids. One mother strongly objected to any âplayingâ on the iPad for her child. Instead, she let her sonâa very intelligent, developmentally sophisticated 4-year-oldâuse age-appropriate reading and math apps for about an hour a day, and then allowed him to watch two TV shows before bedtime.
The other parent let her 3-year-old daughter play games and watch videos on the iPad whenever she wanted. Her favorite game was Angry Birds. She...
Table of contents
Citation styles for Design For Kids
APA 6 Citation
Gelman, D. L. (2014). Design For Kids (1st ed.). Rosenfeld Media. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/1257079/design-for-kids-digital-products-for-playing-and-learning-pdf (Original work published 2014)
Chicago Citation
Gelman, Debra Levin. (2014) 2014. Design For Kids. 1st ed. Rosenfeld Media. https://www.perlego.com/book/1257079/design-for-kids-digital-products-for-playing-and-learning-pdf.
Harvard Citation
Gelman, D. L. (2014) Design For Kids. 1st edn. Rosenfeld Media. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1257079/design-for-kids-digital-products-for-playing-and-learning-pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2022).
MLA 7 Citation
Gelman, Debra Levin. Design For Kids. 1st ed. Rosenfeld Media, 2014. Web. 14 Oct. 2022.