At what age, a child interact with a mobile device? Well, at a very young age they learn to get interacted with mobile devices. They learn to manage these devices and it interfaces with the help of their parents and some from their own experimentation. Besides a great learning capacity, it’s your duty to rearrange the elements of the app in an appropriate way. Remember, if the younger kids don’t find a way to achieve their goals from your app, they get bored earlier and easier. So, the User Interface you design should be certainly simpler.
Before developing mobile apps for kids, you must understand the behavior and pattern of interaction of small kids with different apps. Here are some key suggestions you can keep in mind before mobile app development.
Key Suggestions before developing mobile apps for kids…
1. Extreme Simple Data Entry
Interaction with the interface needs a physical ability. The task which is simple to adults are most likely seems to be difficult to perform for kids of 7 years. Before designing for younger children, this is what you must take into consideration and if you need some textual information to grab than make sure it is in minimal form.
2. Replace Textual Links with Buttons
Instead of handling the computer mouse, the toddlers will find easier to surf on a tablet. This is the first device like tablets and phones they find easier to interact with and therefore they use the buttons interface to perform some kind of actions. Since their basic skills are not yet well developed, larger the buttons, the easier they feel to direct their fingers.
3. The necessity of Icon and Image Usage
Since many of your toddler users still, don’t know how to read, You need to compulsorily place icons and images that help them to analyze the action they want to take. The icon should be large in size and should be related to the action to be taken. More abstract icons, more difficulty the toddler will face.
As your user don’t know how to read, the images should be clear to understand. It should be illustrative and descriptive for the actions. Use of Animation can also help the child to understand the information.
4. Voice-over for narration
As your users don’t know how to read, the voice over can help them to understand at certain times. It would be a perfect help if your app has a story to narrate. But keep in mind that you also have the users who can read and understand the information, So provide an option to enable and disable the voice-over.
So, provide a story through the video. It is scientifically proved that images and videos are easily captured by both children and adults. Start with a video to tell a story. For this, you need to contact expert developers for your mobile app development.
5. Navigation at its original place
For kids, images, icons, and buttons are the identification of how the interface works. Besides this they also use their memory to use this interface, more time they use, more they get familiar. So, if you think to redesign the app, be sure you do not move the main navigation because that can confuse the small users.
Make your navigation bar rigid, no matter at what page the toddler is. Familiarity and easiness is something that all age users would appreciate. For kids to again adjust with the new arrangement is a somewhat annoying task.
6. Optimized Search engine for kids
Before writing the kids learn to read. Therefore, this the problem faced by many designers having concerns about the search option present in many sites and mobile apps. The proper implementation of search bar can result in the improvement of users experience.
Optimizing the search bar for children needs to consider the limitation facts the user can have. Some of the actions to provide are the autocomplete and display the result in a simple format, here also you can use the image to reinforce the search result and encourage the use of search bar.
7. Playful Environment in your app for kids
As you are developing mobile apps for kids, you definitely now that kids learn faster while playing and enjoying themselves. Your app should contain a motivation for the kids so that they visit back to the app and learn more. Try the fun interface like providing a reward system.
The main point is to make your app a playful spirit. Try out by directing your app or website to the games the children most enjoy and provide this kind of some rewards.
8. Testing
Testing is the most important part of each and every project. So here it is also important to test your app. With kids, it is difficult because they don’t follow the instructions and they become restless. You can observe their interactions with the application and then draw the conclusions. Observe the time they take to get used to the applications and is there any sign of stress or frustration that results in not being able to take actions. Be attentive and take some necessary notes.
Conclusion,
Based on these observations you can improve your app and make it extremely simple for your small users. Give your small users freedom of playful learning through these mobile apps for kids.
All this is possible by contacting an experienced mobile app development team and company. Well, here we are at your service. We can help you with all these features on both the platforms Android and iOS.