Discoverability a new learnability principle for children’s application software

Abstract

For more than two decades children’s use of multimedia was restricted to watching television and listening to music. Although some parents complained about children being addicted to listening to music the idea that children could be addicted to television was a real concern to most parents. Nowadays parents not only need to be concerned about how much television their kids are watching, but also many other forms of media that are emerging with the fast development in information and technology such as the internet, video games, tablets and smart phones. From this the researcher came to realize that children are increasingly becoming the consumers of application software facilitated by these information systems. Children spend at least three hours according to research on these media which includes the use of computers, tablets, smartphones and music. The researcher was concerned that system vendors use the same learnability principles to make applications for all age groups based on learnability principles that were designed with adult users in mind. Many interface design principles used for adult products cannot be applied to products meant for children and further yet children at different ages learn differently. The research looked at the existing learnability principles by trying to evaluate them and come up with new principle(s) that can be used to further improve the current principles so that they can be used effectively by information system designers to improve on the learnability of their application software meant for children of different age groups.