Designing web interfaces for kids

Trine Falbe, who teaches UX, interaction design and UI design at the Multimedia Designer Program in Denmark, gave this talk at Front-Trends 2015 in Warsaw, Poland. Kids spend a lot of time online, and their cognitive and physical limitations create many challenges for them. Combined with poorly designed content and dark patterns, that is a bad mix, and Falbe argues that web designers have a responsibility to create things that empower children rather than the opposite.

Drawing on her research with children, games and learning, she explains that kids use interfaces very differently from adults. They have different search patterns, language skills, cognitive skills and motor skills, which has a big impact on how interfaces for children should be designed. Many children use online tools before they can read, and they have never known a world without the internet, which shapes how they act on, interact with and perceive the web.

The talk describes how kids interact with interfaces, how this differs from adult interaction patterns, and offers guidelines for designing non-game web interfaces for children.