Best Practices: Designing Touch Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers by Sesame Workshop instant download

Best Practices: Designing Touch Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers by Sesame Workshop instant download

With ownership of tablets more than doubled over the last year, more children than ever are engaging with touch screen devices. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, today released a paper that offers key findings from touch screen studies and tips for designing and developing apps and ebooks for preschoolers. Best Practices: Designing Touch Tablet Experiences for Preschoolers is based on more than 50 studies and shares Sesame Workshop’s approach and discoveries in creating effective educational content for these mobile platforms.
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Best Practices outlines interactive design points that research has shown to best support child engagement and learning on digital touch platforms. It also categorizes the most and least intuitive gestures for touch screens, tips for visual design and layout. Findings and tips include:
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• Provide dialogue and visual reinforcements to help preschoolers who usually cannot read. Preschoolers are inclined to hold tablets in landscape view.
• Tapping is one of the most intuitive interactions for preschoolers while pinching and flicking are often difficult for children with developing motor skills.
• Preschoolers tend to rest their wrists along the bottom edge of tablets, making hotspots and icons placed along the edge potential triggers for unintentional actions that disrupt the activity.