Reading Response - Week 9
I was pleasantly surprised to conclude this course with perhaps one of the most critical points of e-learning: suitable device use and interface. For years, I babysat a ton of Upper East Side kids who had their own iPads that contained some popular kids’ apps developed (including the obnoxious and highly annoying Tom Cat that Rian van der Merwe mentioned in “A Dad’s Plea to Developers of iPad Apps for Children”). From my experience (mostly from dealing with three-year-olds who insisted that they must play the interactive Sleeping Beauty story for the millionth time), the best apps have an interface that van der Merwe and Nielsen described. And if we were to tie it in with education, if the interface is efficient, then the learning will prosper, negating any unnecessary information that cause distractions (just like Mayer’s point).
The first point I want to make is that developers of free apps have a good but extremely annoying way of slipping in ads that can be so easily touched with a popup that dupes the user to thinking it is part of the actual app. To avoid these ads or to have the “pro pack”, the user needs to upgrade and actually pay for the app. Most of these apps are inexpensive to purchase, but can add up eventually. For schools, that can cost a fortune. Van der Merwe explains in greater detail the Tom Cat app that deviously makes it appear to the user that he is accepting free objects when he really isn’t. The objects are real purchases. Without careful supervision, kids can be purchasing these things unknowingly. The kids I babysat loved Tom Cat – I was even forced to download other characters on my phone – Talking Pierre, Talking Angela, Talking Ginger. The chipmunk-y voice mimicry is cute at times, but the design is so poor. As Jakob Nielsen’s argued about certain apps in “iPad Usability: Year One”, a big error when it comes to app design is “Touchable areas were too small in many apps, as well as too close together, increasing the risk of touching the wrong one.” Talking Tom is notorious for this. Icons are too small to press – especially “x” buttons for exiting. It is trickier pressing buttons on the phone than the iPad because of the size of the device, but from observing children under the age of two trying to press these small icons, they lacked precision. I wonder if app developers could create buttons that were tactable, meaning, the device can sense if a child is trying to press a certain button and will perform the function or even vibrate when the child is touching the screen in the area where the button is located because it perceives that the child wants to touch that button. This would also relate to Nielsen’s observation on “Accidental activation due to unintended touches again caused trouble, particularly in apps lacking a Back button.”
The second point I want to make is that some of the functions the app developers create for kids’ apps require kids to do actions that can be quite frustrating. I’ve seen kids quit a game or cry over it because of those frustrations! Keeping in mind the age that the games are geared toward (for instance, learning the alphabet and tracing letters would target three to five year olds), there is one particular Dora the Explorer game where the user has to “trace” a letter. But instead of tracing the letters with a finger, the app requires the user to move the entire tablet so that an acorn falls from the imaginary sky and traces the letter. It was the same thing as steering the wheel during a racecar game. Not only did I not see the point of that game, I saw that the frustration was being able to accurately move the acorn so that it followed the shape of the letter. The purpose of that game seemed ambiguous – did the developers want the kids to know how to maneuver a tablet? Did they want them to learn the shape of letter? Even though Dora’s voice explained the directions, there was no visual indicator of what to do, which Nielsen points out about low discoverability. In van der Merwe’s case, that game barely had any affordance. The kids used trial and error to figure out how to manipulate the app. In education, while teachers promote discovering and hands-on learning, they will want their students to use an app that does not require them to use half the class time pressing their screens, waiting for something to happen because there is no indication.