Usability Testing with Children

I had my first child usability testing today for a project I am currently working on.  I chose paper prototyping for this phase as I wanted to figure out the issues with the interface before the programming team started working on it with all the holes in full glory.

All I needed - post-its, regular A4 paper, a pair of scissors and glue.  For all the business savvy readers out there, here’s a cheap and quick way to test your interface. An added incentive, it’s incredibly easy to do and does not require a big ol’ testing laboratory like this.

For those of you who are not familiar with paper prototyping, here’s an article to get your feet wet.

A few things to observe when testing children:

• Make the child comfortable before testing him. Have a warm up session - ask him about school, his hobbies, etc.
• Assure the child his parents/guardians are nearby (everyone needs an exit strategy).
• Children have short attention spans.  Make sure the tests do not go over an hour.
• Children are not adults (no brainer here)! Use vocabulary that they understand.
• Do not undermine the child’s intelligence.  You would be surprised on how many children understand the more advanced web concepts like “CAPTCHAs”.

A few things discovered after testing children:

• Children are just like adults.  Lack of product response after executing an action confuses them just as much as it confuses adults.  A direct quote from a participant - “Did I submit the form?”
• Children do read instructions - something I found a little surprising as most adults tend to skim over instructions.
• Children do learn patterns on the web.  Learn to use design patterns in your products to maximize learnability.  Refer to some excellent design pattern description here by Yahoo.
• Some terms that adults might take for granted such as the word “blog” might not ring a bell in a childs’ mind.