Usability Heuristics for Early Primary Children: A Case Study in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Tablet-mediated learning becomes popular among kindergarten children with the encroachment of technology . Most educational app developers target pre-school children in their app market. Therefore developers increasingly create educational apps that target this age group. The study of usability aspects of such applications is important due to the lack of cognitive and physical development of children in this age group. However, as per the literature most of the current applications for pre-school children are not successful due to a lack of consideration of usability. Hence, preschool children face many usability issues when using these applications. Due to limited cognitive and physical development, children of early primary education find it difficult to use those applications. There are many usability frameworks developed but most of them have been developed targeting adult users. So, there is no standard framework for early primary children. Hence, this research aims to propose a set of usability heuristics that can be used by the designers of tablet-mediated applications for early primary children.