How to Design Global Applications for Children

Articles | on Sep. 11, 2011 | by 0 Comments

Most web designers are aware and familiar with digital applications for adults as the majority of their projects will focus on this age group. However, there are times when you may have to design an application whose objective is to meet the needs of children living in various countries on the globe. These are new types of challenges for many web designers and there are certain hurdles to overcome and issues to keep in mind.

If you do ever have this kind of project on a big scale, your usual design process may have to come with some changes as you will need to adapt to the needs of younger generations and different age groups, which will influence the whole project.

Before starting on your project, ask yourself some important questions, as not only are you creating an application for children, you will also have to consider their cultural and geographical situation. Think about how you can develop a design for such an extensive and varied cultural group, as it is not likely you will be able to create a digital application that will suit everyone.  However, you can narrow the field down quite a bit by classifying your audience into user-types through research.

When you start researching user trends for children you should consider several points:

Pick a team of researchers that speak the children’s native languages, although many of the children may speak English or any other language as a second language. This will help put the children at ease during the sessions dedicated to research, especially with children younger than twelve.

Ideally you should organize research sessions where your design team can visit the locations where the children live in despite the fact they do not know how to speak the language. By doing so your research team will understand in more depth what the children’s mental models are based on the demographic groups and their cultural habits.

Forums or message boards and other online communities may be of help when testing users from different locations in the world. This may help you research more widely when using the web-based research panels as you will be able to access a higher number of users.

These different platforms sometimes include major applications, which may be virtual worlds and online game communities and are sometimes created with the main objective of testing and sharing information with a certain category of users. These applications can be very useful, as once the main ideas are conceived, these can be tested with an interactive trail product, thus providing a solid feedback on what should be modified in the actual design application.

Keep in mind that when you are conceiving the layout and planning of an interface for a global digital product, it is important to consider how the layout may change once the content that will be included in the web pages is translated. As a web designer you should also consider if you should develop a different application for each area in the world that the company wishes to cover.

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