I was part of the team and was responsible for the user experience and visual design for the modules I worked on. In addition, I worked alongside a product manager.
Putao Camera is a camera application on the PaiPad, a children's tablet developed for 3-12 years old children, released by Shanghai Putao Technology. It can be used as a learning and entertainment tool for children, supporting videos, games, and picture books, as well as supporting safety eye protection.
We believe that technology is not just for adults, and we hope to use cutting-edge technology to lead children to explore the world and guard their constant curiosity. Putao Camera as a built-in application on PaiPad, we hope to record beautiful moments while making taking photos more fun.
At the time, we mainly conducted desk research, and the book DESIGN FOR KIDS - Digital Products for Playing and Learning (By Debra Levin Gelman) helped us a lot. This book tells the difference between designing for children and designing for adults. And that design for children is not just about infantilizing adult things. Design for children is a serious matter. In addition, when we have a finished product developed, we invite children to interact to see how they can operate and react.
At first, we found that we needed to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. Indeed, there is no such thing as "designing for children," defined as everybody aged 3-12. At a minimum, you must distinguish between young (3-5), mid-range (6-8), and older (9-12) children. Each group has different behaviors, and the users get substantially more web-savvy as they age.
But as we took a step deeper, we found that on a tablet that provides learning and entertainment for children, it was critical to retain a consistent user experience rather than bounce users among pages targeting different age groups. What we needed to provide was a consistent experience.
By organizing, we found that these aspects of electronic devices influence the child's use of：
Children's hands are much smaller than adults, so it is easy to click by mistake. We need to make it easy for children to avoid mistakes. One way to do this is by creating big enough targets and spacing them. So children do not click the wrong targets by mistake.
We also found that touchscreen designs for children under nine should emphasize swiping, tapping, and dragging. These gestures are the simplest for younger users because they require big movements of arms and hands, which are better developed during early childhood than fine motor skills.
Unconventional and custom icons are hard to recognize because they have poor information scent. As children’s reading skills are developing, icons play an important role in helping kids navigate through sites and apps. Through the research, we found that as long as the icons were conventional and simple in design, they worked well, especially for kids younger than 6 years old.
Children are naturally attracted to movement, graphics, funny sounds, and vivid colors. However, there’s a fine line between entertaining the children and overwhelming them. Visual appeals do not equate to chaos, even for children. When too many page elements compete for children’s attention at the same time, children get overwhelmed: they do not know what to do and what to attend first.
So we hope that not only the camera application, but the whole tablet offers an experience of neat, lively, and young.
In our studies, we learned that most time, parents were involved when their children encountered challenging operations, such as trying to get a new site. After arriving at the desired websites, children were often allowed to continue on their own. Most parents of young children perceived device time as free babysitting and used it to get other things done in the immediate proximity of the child.
We wanted to create a tablet that children can use without adult help. That is why the camera interface removes some of the features adults often use, such as countdown timer, photo scale, and flash. We put the filters and cropping in the photo editing.
In addition to some fundamental functions, we added some fun to the use. Kids are prone to laughing at the slightest pleasures, and it is their nature to laugh. So we added a smile mode to the camera where the camera automatically shoots when it catches a smiling face in the frame.
We tried several schemes for the camera layout. At first, we thought that adding a white background would make the operation more obvious, but this would block the view in the viewfinder, so we gave up the scheme of adding a white background under the operation area. And considering that children are holding the tablet with both hands, it is easier for them to operate it on the right side. Considered together final layout is shown below in C.
1. Whether the younger children (3-5 years old) could find the camera app and take pictures by themselves.
2. When switching to smile mode, did the kids know that the mode is: smile -> auto-shoot.
3. Whether the algorithm of the smile mode is sensitive enough to take a picture immediately when the child smiles.
1. Both 3 and 4 years old children were able to find the camera and take photos without any problem, and the 4-year-olds could even check the photos themselves after taking them.
2. In smile mode, a 3-year-old child needed guidance on what to do next. For example, "try to smile like the smiling face on the screen."
3. After switching to smile mode, children of other ages can operate smoothly without guidance (including the 4-year-old child), and when they saw the smile face on the screen, they would smile at the smiling face on the screen.
4. Smile mode was not sensitive enough to capture the face. It required show teeth to be captured and photographed, which made children feel a little frustrated, because not whenever they smiled, the camera could successfully take pictures.
