Four tips for designing an iPad software interface for younger children

The iPad software for younger children is a special field: on the one hand, it is well known that this market is very promising-no one cares about iPad after 00, and parents will always be willing to spend money for their children. On the other hand, people who write, talk about, and play iPad software are not younger children. Serious discussions in this field are rare. Luke vobiski summed up four experiences by observing his one-and-a-half-year-old son's interaction with touch-screen devices. For the original article, see here.

1. Use the splash screen with caution ).

This is actually something Apple mentioned in the iPhone user interface specification. It is recommended that developers do not design special boot screens for iPhone software according to the traditional desktop software habits, instead, users should immediately see a screen (called launch image by Apple) That is roughly the same as the main UI of the software after clicking the software Icon ). The user instantly sees a screen similar to the main UI after clicking it, which will lead to the illusion that the software has been started. In other words, compared with the use of another boot screen, he will feel that your software starts faster. Apple's iPhone software, such as weather and stocks, is designed to follow this principle.

Younger children are less able to concentrate than adults, so the startup screen is more likely to make them lose patience.

2. Use traditional graphic interfaces with caution.

Due to the lack of psychological cognitive models, young children cannot distinguish between "interface elements" (buttons, controls, and so on) and "content" like adults who have been using computers for a long time 」, they often don't know what can be clicked or not on the screen. (In fact, many adults are not necessarily clear .) In addition, children-oriented software is designed to take into account the children's needs for visual aesthetics, adopt a lively, bright, cute visual style, the interface elements designed in this way often have style conflicts with the standard interface elements provided by IOS. (Two pieces of the Literacy software dr. Seuss's ABC Book are inserted in the original article. See .)

Vobiski believes that the solution to this problem is to treat the content directly as the UI, which is also the first law of "natural user interface" (Nui, natural user interfaces.

3. consider adding a long-pressed gesture 」.

Younger children usually do not have good control over their physical movements and cannot precisely click a certain area on the screen as adults do. When his right hand tries to point a button, his left hand may unconsciously press the corner of the screen to form a multi-point touch. If your software requires users to have the precise point-based capabilities of adults, it may cause inconvenience for children to use them. Therefore, we should try our best to observe and analyze the gesture habits of younger children when using iPad, and provide the maximum tolerance for incorrect behaviors in software design.

4. Suppress duplicate click.

Once a child finds that a certain area is partitioned, he or she often prefers to repeat the area. This has negative effects on some software. For example, if the voice button in the software that teaches a child to read a word is repeatedly pressed, the effect of the black rubber record Jumper may appear. Therefore, we should consider ignoring repeated point presses with time intervals not greater than xx seconds.