Usability Heuristics for Children Educational Mobile App

Abstract

The market for educational mobile applications presents a diverse range of options aimed at different audiences’ satisfaction, especially children. However, a considerable portion of these applications comprises multiple ages and disregards aspects intrinsic to early childhood education, where children have differentiated interaction needs and specific educational needs. In the field of computers in education studies, we found only a set of usability heuristics for educational mobile applications (generic heuristics); however, these heuristics do not consider specific aspects of early childhood education. In this sense, this paper presents the research results in which a set of usability heuristics for a specific educational app for children’s domain was developed and evaluated. The new heuristics were evaluated by teachers and researchers of Child Education, specialists in Human Computer Interaction, and researchers in Computing in Education. In addition, the efficacy and efficiency of the new heuristics evaluated considering generic heuristics, through an experiment in which the degree of coverage of the new heuristics was identified. The percentage of heuristics violated in the evaluation performed using generic heuristics was lower than the new heuristics’ violations. Therefore, the new heuristics were more appropriate for evaluating educational mobile applications in the children’s domain.