Role: Solo UX Researcher
Research Type: Exploratory and Evaluative UXR
Research Method: Heuristic Evaluation + User Testing at home settings + Interviews
Goal: Evaluate how usability affects children's play experience with a focus on their emotions and learning and explore actionable design solutions
Research Context
Background
There's an influx of educational games for young children to learn computational thinking skills. Osmo Coding Awbie is one of the most important players in this market.
Given the Covid-19 pandemic, the chances of young children staying and learning at home have been dramatically increasing since 2020. Thus, how the target players interact with such products with parents at home is very important.
Educators and parents pay more attention to children's playful learning in the home settings.
Goal
Thus, from the theoretical perspectives of UX, child psychology, and affective learning, I aim to explore how children users interact with the tangible tablet-based educational coding game to trigger learning and generate actionable design solutions.
Heuristic evaluation and game analysis
Contextual inquiry design
Participant recruitment
User testing, play observations, and semi-structured interviews with children in the home setting
Affinity Wall
Qualitative Data Coding
Reporting
Research Impact
Strategic Impact
Product strategy pivot backed by learning evidence and research insights.
This research has constructed robust and comprehensive insights regarding children's play, emotions, and learning for strategy teams to leverage.
Product Design Suggestion
Accommodate children with different abilities by adding proactive tutorials for navigation and guidance, giving freedom to players to decide whether to skip them or not.
Incorporate storytelling throughout the game to refresh children's recognition of the game design and enhance their learning.
Add more fun characteristics to game characters to make game narratives more engaging.
Research Dissemination
I presented this research project at the ACM Interaction Design and Children 2022 Conference, one of the most important conferences for children's tech products.
You can find the full research paper here.
Adapt interviews questions and methods according to children's understanding
Make research fun so child participants share more genuine insights
Future research directions could consider dialogic learning in product development to improve affective learning experience