Designing products for children requires careful consideration of their unique characteristics and requirements, especially when creating a virtual experience for them. With this in mind, our study aimed to identify the principles and design strategies essential for crafting effective brand experiences for children aged between 4 and 7 years.
Our approach consisted of three integral steps: observing stores selling stationery, art & craft materials, and toys; interviewing children and parents to understand their preferences and features; testing the concepts with children and refining designs based on their feedback.
Multiple principles and insights emerged from the three rounds of research and web analytics following the launch. While these are crucial for designing experiences for children aged 4-7 years, designers should also understand that kids' preferences vary based on their gender, cultural, and socio-economic context.
1. Inclusion of characters:Children are interested in various characters and enjoy interacting with them. The ability to customize and interact with these characters allows children to personalize their gaming experience and engage on a deeper level.
- They want different characters (cartoons, superheroes, avatars, animals, etc) in the experience. For example, children were fascinated by the hunter character introduced in the brand experience we launched.
- They should be able to interact with these characters and customize them. For example, kids love the concept of Tamagotchi where virtual characters grow with them and help them achieve tasks.
2. Using different modalities: Apart from visual design, audio as well as haptic feedback on surprise and re
- Do not read instructions; audio descriptions and visual cues help them figure out their next actions.
3. Multiple Levels: There should be levels in the experience where they unlock each level after completing tasks.
- Accomplishment and progress are essential.
- However, the number of levels should be between 3 and 5. Additionally, children should have a sense of achievement as too many levels might lead to a drop in engagement among kids.
4. Reward system: This is based on the theory of reinforcement learning where actions are rewarded to strengthen the behavior of achieving goals.
- After each level is completed, provide appreciation/validation in the form of textual/ visual elements. For instance, when a kid completes one level they expect the system to show appreciation by saying “good job” or by the sound of claps.
- For each task they complete they need to collect coins/stars/points that and should be able to exchange for something else.
- Unlike adults, kids do not care about materialistic rewards.
5. Learning by doing: Children are not listeners; they learn from their experience of doing tasks hands-on, which enhances their understanding and engagement in the digital realm.
6. Duration of engagement: Children have shorter attention spans, making it challenging to engage them for long periods. It is generally expected to take approximately 3 minutes to complete one level, but post-launch web analytics showed that kids stayed engaged beyond 3-5 minutes.
7. Text agnostic: It was observed that most kids of this age range either cannot read or do not want to read text, so visual and tactile cues can help. Kids can read one-word CTAs, but they mostly rely on the colors of the CTAs. For example, green means "go."
8. Challenges in providing data: If the brand is interested in creating a database of information about children, it is important to note that children of this age group may not know their email addresses or phone numbers. They know how to write their name but may find it difficult to type.
The above insights can help design better experiences for kids aged 4-7 years. However, ethical considerations are crucial in the design process.
