Metal Fish Eggs

Right about now a number of notable folks in the world of children’s technology are on their way to the Dust or Magic AppCamp. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make the trip. But I thought I’d use this as an excuse to share a few of the lessons learned in developing Tickle Tap Apps.

We ran numerous testing sessions with kids throughout the development of our apps. Many very informal with friends, family and a few strangers here and there. With the help of mom and HCI consultant Deborah Ptak who works at University of Toronto we were able to gather a lot of useful feedback on the apps. Deb organized and ran a number of testing sessions with kids aged 3 to 6. We were able to make quite a few small improvements based on these sessions. Many of these issues can be grouped into three sets:

Unintentional triggering of the buttons. Any buttons near the edge of the screen WILL be hit by kids by accident. Repeatable. The Tickle Tap Apps use a ‘back’ button placed in the bottom right corner of the screen (all our preschool apps are landscape). Over and over again we watched as kids accidentally hit this button as they shifted their grip on the device. As a result we moved the placement of this button to the top left corner. So keep your buttons away from the edges of the screen and especially the bottom corners of the screen. And when it comes to do QA testing make sure your app survives all ten fingers mashing madly away at once.

Unintentional touches blocking intentional touches. Unless you make special accommodations an active touch event will block the triggering of subsequent events. In other words if you are touching the edge of the screen accidentally the app won’t respond to intentional touches. A solution is to set up your apps as multitouch and write the code in such as a way the it can accept input even if a stray finger is resting somewhere else on the screen.

Voice-over and animation overload. This came out only after longer game-play. Once kids got the hang of a game they charged ahead and suddenly the voice-overs went from helpful to annoying and the animations from novel and rewarding to just getting in the way. So we got smart with our voice-over. We took some of it out, we made some of it play only after an inactivity time-out and made some of it only play the first time through on a new game play. And we pared back the frequency of the little animations that are peppered throughout our apps. Getting this balance right is tricky and of course it’s not an issue that is limited to mobile apps.

So I hope all the AppCampers enjoy the Ocean views. Building apps for kids has been a tremendous experience and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how liberating it is to break out of the browser and ditch the mouse and keyboard. Consider this an open invite to get in touch and share your questions and insights. Tickle Tap is just the start for us!