Elements of Computing: Elements of Usability: Usability and Children Part 1

The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis has been an Edutainment favourite for many years (And a personal favourite too!)

Traditionally, usability has been defined in a very particular way and with a very specific group of people in mind. ISO 9241-11(ISO, 1998) defines usability as "the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use." Typically usability studies are performed for on the job software, where the user uses the software to complete a task that is related to their occupation or is required practically in their personal life. Software of this category is developed for adults. By contrast, software developed for children requires a completely new way of thinking of usability. Software in this category differs from other software because it is used voluntarily and is not necessarily task-oriented. Since using the software is, in fact, voluntary using the product must be fun or else it will not be used.

Edutainment is a specific classification of software that combines educational elements with fun elements of entertainment, hence the fusion of the words. The objective of edutainment is to provide a learning environment that is engaging and makes children want to continue to learn. However, if children are incapable of effectively using the software, they are not very likely to learn while using it. An application is therefore usable not when it can be used to complete tasks, but when it is effective at teaching the material. Furthermore, software with usability problems are neither fun nor engaging, and children will not want to use it regardless of its merits. One suggested way to evaluate the success of an edutainment application is through a child's reaction. If the child is willing and able to teach another child how to use it, you have a great product on your hands. Unfortunately, while this test is a good indicator, it is difficult to actually test it in any meaningful way. There really is no agreed upon definition for or method for finding usability of children's software, but there are a four pillars of that seem to be consistent: effective learning, effective teaching, effective communication and effective use of technology.

Before we get too focused on the educational portion however, there is another important stakeholder to discuss: children. Since usability is focused on user-centred design and children are the primary consumers of edutainment, children factor just as heavily into the usability equation. What do kids look for in an application? Ultimately, the answer typically comes down to one thing: fun. Children learn through play so they will gravitate towards activities they enjoy and shy away from those they do not. If edutainment software is not fun, children won't learn anything for one very simple reason: they won't use it. The challenge of the edutainment designer is to combine fun and function into an appealing and intuitive design. Sound hard? Get comfortable.

Putting the “Fun” in “Function”

The success of an edutainment game is strongly influenced by two factors: whether or not it is an effective teaching tool and whether or not is a fun pass-time. Without fun, children will not have the desire to use the application, meaning there is absolutely no opportunity to learn from it. Another important aspect to consider is fun's counterpart: frustration. Edutainment should not disregard the usability knowledge that has already been compiled for you to use simply because the target audience is different. The same standards should still apply, but with some extra considerations. The reason is simple: when a child has a difficult time trying to understand how to navigate your software, they have a lot less fun. The challenge of edutainment is getting amusement and education balanced appropriately.

Mudball Wall from The Zoombinis combines logic and fun with a zany machine, pattern matching, great animation and just enough hints to keep children both engaged and learning.

Good educational software should never be passive. The more activity that is on the screen, the more engaging it will be for children to play with. However, activity on the screen cannot be passive activity – good edutainment has learners constantly doing and interacting, not watching and listening. Meaningful interaction should integrated into your product as much as possible to ensure that your audience enjoys the time they spend with your product. Using multimedia to enhance engagement and stimulation can increase attention span for young learners. Customisation is also important when considering edutainment with multiple levels of both learning and game-play. Your audience should be able to customise the pace of the software to optimise the program for their individual learning style and specific needs. A good rule of thumb is to include two levels below and above the average difficulty. Despite your best estimates and tests, there will always be learners who enjoy a slower pace and those learners who crave the extra challenge.

For children, much of their ability to enjoy themselves rides on their ability to both immerse themselves in and relate to the physical design of the interface. The appearance factor often outweighs other factors such as functionality. Children tend to choose the application that features characters they recognise, lots of colours and vivid designs. Young learners tend to click on icons that look familiar to them, such as a paintbrush or pencil tool in a paint application. They are less likely to click on icons that look unfamiliar to them such as the dropper tool. Furthermore, simplistic, yet colourful designs tend to better than complex designs. More complication often means more confusion on the part of the user.

An important aspect of both fun and usability is to ensure that users are always aware of what is going on, both in game and out of game. For example, often instead of a navigation menu, the child is presented with an image. Menu controls are undetectable by the user until they roll over the elements of the screen to find which ones have roll-over effects and which ones do not. The lack of clear, definable navigation means that some areas may be overlooked or may frustrate the user. In game, enemies and obstacles should be clearly shown as such. If it is impossible to distinguish what is good from what is bad, an edutainment game will be unplayable, meaning that instead of the focus being on learning the lesson while playing a game, the game's mechanic becomes the central focus and learning does not take place as much. A general rule is to include a mechanic that distinguishes elements that a child can interact with from everything else. Subtle signals to indicate possible interaction keeps the game moving at a good pace as well as curbs frustration with the software.

Moreover, the quality of the instructions plays a role in how fun the game is. Since you cannot play the game before understanding how to play it, instructions are crucial. Keep your audience in mind when designing your instructions. Children should be comfortable with what they are reading, not pushed to frustration. Instructions should be clear, typed in a font large enough for young eyes to read without straining and no longer than a few sentences. Images and animations are also very helpful, displaying on screen which key to press for a certain action is more helpful than stating the key on screen only. Furthermore, many children do not know the names of all the keys on the keyboard. Most children simply have not had the exposure required to be able to identify every key. To further complicate the issue, some keyboards do not label every key, or label keys with their symbols instead of their names making them difficult or impossible for young learners to find. Some keyboards label keys with acronyms or have different names for keys altogether. For example, some keyboards use the term “enter key” while other use the term “return key”.

The Pizza Man describes instructions orally to children in The Zoombinis.

Beyond the basic interface of the game, the game-play itself should be engaging, informative and fun. There are many approaches to this aspect of edutainment, and for every genre the guidelines for making a game fun are different, mostly because of the variance in the niche audiences they target. Since there are many gaming styles, I cannot possibly focus on all of them, but I can give some general tips to keep any kind of educational game on the right track.

A good rule is to analyse and imitate current trends in gaming. If you are making a game that already has a successful, non-edutainment counterpart, it would be worth your time to invest some time playing it and figuring out what it is that makes it fun to play. In particular make sure that common mechanics like jumping are similar to non-edutainment games of the same genre. Your audience most likely plays games that are not educational as well and will be used to certain mechanics that will be difficult to “unlearn”. Do your homework and understand how your game works. Often the games that are the most fun are the games with smooth, simple controls but incremental creative challenges. Games that are the most fun to play give games a rush when they win. That rush comes from having just the right amount of challenge that it isn't easy but not so much that it's impossible. Overcoming obstacles and achieving that “epic win” is a driving force in the level of enjoyment experienced by the player. The most memorable games tend to be the games that are easy to play, but difficult to play well.

Making the Grade

The other half of edutainment is the educational portion. Since the reason for the existence of edutainment is usually the educational half of the equation and not the gaming half, the unique usability needs of teaching through software should also be addressed. Teachers use educational software in classrooms and school computer labs and parents use educational software with their children at home. Edutainment is becoming increasingly common as more pressure is placed on parents to help their children excel academically. Edutainment is not just about the fun, it is also about the learning.

One of the most crucial elements, and one of the hardest to incorporate is effective and appropriate feedback. Many edutainment applications highlight negative feedback or positive feedback but very few highlight both and even fewer explain why a young learner received the feedback they received. One of the main reasons why being taught by another person is because of the feedback they give. Think of how a tutor might teach a young child. The child makes a mistake and the tutor observes it. The tutor determines what the error is and figures out what may have led them to the answer they gave. The tutor then explains to the child where in the process they are having difficulty, and teaches them the correct method to arriving at the answer. Software often tells a child whether they are right or wrong, but rarely has the capability to determine why a child came up with the answer they input, or to highlight exactly where they think the child may have gone wrong. One solution is to display the correct answer if the child has given an incorrect answer, however this solution only identifies the data the child got wrong and does not address the root of the problem. Despite its implementation restrictions, feedback is one of the largest overlooked elements of edutainment when assessing the learning portion of the product.

Zoombinis cannot sit next to each other on the raft if they do not have something in common. When a zoombini cannot be placed next to another zoombini the rafting frog explains why in his amusingly funny voice.

As I mentioned previously, the range of difficulty should be varied for game-play. This rule also holds true in terms of the informative content of edutainment as well. Provide your audience with two levels of difficulty both below and above what you believe is a reasonable difficulty. Consider carefully whether or not you will tie your game difficulty to your educational difficulty. One benefit of keeping the two separate is that children are even more able to customise their own learning pace, relieving frustration. However, by separating the two difficulties the product may open itself up to becoming less educational when children interested in the game discover they can turn the information difficulty to beginner and the game-play difficulty to expert in order to relieve themselves of the need to think.

One question that is debated is whether or not to include quizzes as part of the game. Quizzes definitely lower fun but they arguably encourage learning. There is a common fear that making edutainment too much fun lowers the value children place on education, that because edutainment makes learning more fun children will be less likely to take their academic careers less seriously. This theory has been neither proven or dis-proven to my knowledge, but it is a pervasive view point nonetheless. Some games attempt to graft quizzes onto game-play, but this style of fusion often makes both the game and the learning more difficult. In one example, the quizzes were too difficult not because of the content but because of the developmental stage of the target audience. Younger learners often didn't realise that they could pause the game to give themselves more time to read the quiz questions. Often, the hand dexterity required to move the mouse amongst so many different on-screen locations in order to answer the quizzes was not developed enough and led to frustration. In a different study, tests were used successfully at the end of game sessions to test the child on the knowledge that had been presented during the level. Quizzes used in this manner seemed to be effective, linking the testing to the lessons in a very direct way, without impeding either education or entertainment. In this approach the student not only receives games and lessons separate from evaluations (just like they would in the classroom) but they are taught to connect the evaluation with learning and understand that testing does not just pop into the teacher's brain, but comes from structured lessons and curriculum that takes place before the testing.

An important rule for highlighting the informative content of the game is to design the ambient stimulation to enhance learning instead of distracting from it. Games generally require mood to be effective, which is traditionally established through graphics and sound. Some other examples of stimulation includes physical movement such as moving the mouse in specific ways or motion technology such as using controllers that shake. Regardless of the choice of stimulation, make sure that it is consistent with the content of the application. Music, graphics and participation should all feel natural so that it does not distract from the learning that should be taking place. Intuitive controls shift the focus away from figuring out how to navigate menus and play the game to solving problems and overcoming challenges.

The Balancing Act

As an aside, children tend to have much more fun when they use educational software with other children. Edutainment applications that are stimulating for both participants are far more successful both at entertaining children and at teaching them. Moreover, children working with a friend are much more likely to talk about a problem, feel more confident trying new things and comfortably explore new functionality.

In conclusion, there are clearly differing concerns from the differing purposes of edutainment software. If all the educational aspects are effective, if the game itself is not fun then the player will not play it, receiving no education at all. By contrast, if the application is fun, but users do not learn anything than the application is really no more than a game and cannot be considered edutainment at all. However, since edutainment products are used voluntarily and are not used strictly for completing a task, fun is an important factor. Since children learn through play, the “fun” factor and the “learning” factor have to be kept in balance all the time.

In summary, here is a short list of guidelines I have compiled for children's edutainment software based on the material covered in this blog:

Integrate meaningful interaction.
Allow for a wide range of difficulty and provide incremented challenge.
Include familiar symbols, graphics or character.
Use simple, but colourful design.
Clearly define what the user can interact with.
Keep instructions simple and straight forward.
Keep your game consistent with the classics.
Aim to make your game easy to play but hard to play well.
Give effective and prominently visible (and/or auditory) feedback.
Maintain natural and unobtrusive background stimulation.

Elements of Computing

Friday, December 17, 2010

Elements of Usability: Usability and Children Part 1 - Edutainment

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