iPad App for Kids: "Spot Goes to School"

Spot Goes to School is an iPad app that consists of an interactive a story book and a mini game. It is a simple yet well-designed app for kids. We will go through one round of heuristic evaluation by using Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics.

Home screen of "Spot Goes to School"

1. Visibility of System Status

At the home screen, users have three options, "Read", "Play" and "More". It is a rather simple system. We will go through the game first, followed by the book.

As soon as user tap on "Play" button, the display changes as shown in the screenshot below. Without any action taken, the app read out the line "Help...the Nature Table..." by itself, slowly and clearly.

When user shakes iPad hard (yes a small problem here is we really had to shake hard otherwise nothing would happen), the table is messed up, again, with the lines read out loudly and clearly.

What the users should do now is, to tap and drag items to its original place. As shown in the screenshot below, every time the user taps and holds on a item, a white spot appears on the table to hint the user.

Here comes the interesting part. Every time an item is back to its original place, a positive feedback is given right after, in terms of text+audio; And the words change from time to time. For example, "Great!", "Well done!", "Brilliant!", etc.

When every item is back to its place, clear feedback and instruction to replay of game is given.

But we spot a problem here. As shown above, if we move everything back to the table, but not to the designated places (indicated by white spots), no feedback is given since the last correct movement.

As for the story book, every page has good interactive illustration, and well-designed feedback with animated images and audio. At the bottom of each page, there are big, visibly clear page-flipping buttons.

When the user reaches the last page, it is shows "The End", and a "Read Again" button appears.

But there is a problem here of the book. If the user exit halfway reading the book, or (accidentally) taps the home button (located on the top righe corner of each page, this button will be discussed in more details later), when he/she taps again "Read" button from the home screen, a pop-up dialogue is shown. It asks user to choose, either to continue reading, or to start again from the first page, or cancel (do nothing). The instruction (status message) is not very much clear with a only word "Confirm". Confirm what? This is even more confusing when the user goes back to the app after several hours since he/she last quit the app. To improve this, we suggest that, instead of a simple "Confirm", a full sentence explaining the current situation is preferred, such as "You left the book halfway last time. Do you want to continue from the last page were at?". Respectively, the options should be "Yes, bring me to the last page I were at", "No, I want to start from the first page" and "Cancel".

2. Match Between System and the Real World

The app did quite well for this. All text in the book and the game was written in a easy-to-understand, user-oriented manner.

3. User Control and Freedom

As an app for kids, with very limited function/buttons and interaction, it is very impossible that users will go "wrong". The only places here in this app that kids may go "wrong", or got stuck is probably during the game play, and the information page. Bud this app gives good solutions.

As shown somewhere before, during the game play the user may probably reach a stage, where no feedback is given at all. In such case, user has an option to go back to home screen, by tapping the "Back" button, or the Home button located on the top right corner.

4. Consistency and Standards

There is only one stage in the mini game so, nothing much to say about that. As for the book, the ways of interaction are consistent on every page. For example, tapping on lines of words on a page will make the app read them out; page-flipping buttons appear at the same position on every page.

The only problem here is, it uses the same image to represent the "back to home" button on the game screen, and the "back to last page" button on the book screen. And there is a special Home button, located on the top right corner on the screen of both modes.

5. Error Prevention

As discussed above, in this app there are very few places that users can go "wrong". If have to pick one out, that is probably external links. As for external links (or hidden links to promotion pages, which are advertisers' favorite way to make profits, probably), this app act in a smart way. It shows a warning message for external links, and the user may choose to open it or not. This effectively prevents children's innocent act of "accidentally buying a paid app and not being aware of that". More over, leaving the app and opening Safari, looks like "the game is broken" for young kids who have no idea of "web browser" at all.

6. Recognition Rather Than Recall

We noticed that, there is constant background music playing throughout the running of the app. If we want to turn off that music during the reading of the book, the only way is: go back to home screen-tap on mute button-tap on "Read" button-tap "Continue Reading". That's way too long for user to recall every step. We assume that it was due to simplicity concern for the developers to remove the audio control button from each page of the book, making it appear only on the home screen; but this is on the other hand adding troubles.

7. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

The universal Back-to-Home button.

There is this icon that appears everywhere in the application, on the top right corner of screen. It works as a good shortcut back to home screen regardless of your current state in the app. Novice users may not be used to it (because this icon does not have any indicative label) - but once they do, they will find it very useful. And it is easy to recognize dut to its fixed position and look.

However for the book, there is no option for page navigation like normal e-books. User can only flip one page forward/backward at each time. Again we assume it is due to simplicity consideration.

By the way, this app supports screen rotation on the home screen and pages showing more info only. It does not work for the book and the game.

8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Well, in terms of minimalist design, this app has done its best. Every single page/screen contains no extra information, yet fun to play with.

9. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover From Errors

Since there can hardly be an error for this children's app, not much comments here.

10. Help and Documentation

This application is equipped with well-documented instruction page. However obviously this is not for kids to read, but their parents.