Observing a young child being exposed to digital media for the first time is an enlightening opportunity for usability professionals. We get a rare chance to observe someone who has no fear of the technology or of failure, and who is working from raw intuition. Young children possess a rare gift of an open mind, ready for exploration. Through this gift, they can provide a unique insight on how to build user experiences built on human intuition, not predetermined best practices.
Adults who are exposed to new technology or approaches most often bring fears with them, that they will break something, or fail. Adults also have preconceived ideas of how something should work, based on past technical experiences or best practices.
Don’t get me wrong, best practices are certainly useful, as they help people feel at ease and achieve their goals quickly. But it’s also essential to explore new approaches, by being reminded about what’s fundamentally intuitive. And while young children may not be your target audience, there is much to learn from their raw intuition that can be applied to creating new breakthroughs in user experiences.
Help Your End Users Have No Fear
Whether it’s typing an email that doesn’t make much sense, browsing a beloved cartoon character’s web site (and perhaps even playing a game), or snapping away pictures with a digital camera with reckless abandon, children have a passion for learning as much as they can with less understanding of any related consequences. It’s amazing to watch them rapidly learn new technologies simply because they don’t have a fear of what could happen if they go down the wrong path.
That reinforces the value of our profession. As user experience professionals, we strive to make our end users have a great experience, and hopefully chip away at any preconceived fears they have. So as we work on our deliverables, we can think about how to make our target audience forget any of their fears. And we can help transform them to experiencing that sense of wonder and exploration of a child, where small touches can make a big difference in the full experience.
Of course many of us don’t get to work on projects that naturally capture that inner child. But how can we help plan for making the ordinary into extraordinary? How can we educate our team members and project stakeholders on understanding their end user, and collaborating with them to capture that excitement in the end project? These are questions we should all ask ourselves when we start a project, and never stop.
Leverage Intuition to Explore New Opportunities
In this day and age, projects with tight timeframes and budgets occur much more frequently than projects that naturally provide time to sit back and explore our inner child, for new, creative ideas. So instead we often fall back on best practices and what’s been done before.
We can easily fall out of that habit by observing a young child, who is working with almost pure intuition to accomplish his goals online. It takes us back to that basic cognitive thought process, and what is instinctly apparent to end users–so easy a child could do it.
It’s amazing to watch a child who doesn’t know how to read, as she understands what to click on from supporting simplistic visuals and icons. And how the user interface can guide her down an intended path.
You can almost see the wheels in a child’s mind turn as he explores buttons and other functionality without hesitation. It’s also mind opening to hear the child say what he thinks should be possible before he even does it, or what he is looking for if he is stumped. It often makes the most perfect sense.
From this experience, it reminds me to always try to start with a clean slate. Try not to think about how it’s been done before, and put the logo or navigation in a location on your wireframe simply because it’s a best practice. Stop and think about your end users, and what would be fundamentally intuitive to them to explore a new approach.
Of course, the best way to gain this understanding is from user research. Gain an understanding of the target audience’s mindset, how they interact with technology, and what their fears and goals are. Then start creating. Try new approaches that will help users forget their fears, and return to exploring what’s intuitive. And then test your new approaches with users. Refine and test again.
Understanding what’s innately intuitive, first through a child’s eyes and then with your target audience, can help your end users overcome their fears so they can accomplish their goals, find delight through the extraordinary, and find their own inner child.