A Usability Study On Flash-based Websites For Young Children

With the development of information technology, Internet has become one of the important ways for children to contact with outside world. It has developed into a social requirement to educate children through digital means. But in China the construction of children websites are still on the initial stage with limited contents and interaction designed according to children's cognition. Thus the purpose of edutainment is far from being satisfied. Usability engineering methods are widely adopted and regarded to be useful ways to collect children's requirements and design children products. However, at present there are no relevant studies or practices in China.The paper is based on the commission project of Mykaka edutainment Co. Ltd. The author tries to apply usability engineering methods to reconstruction of the existed children website. The study is made up of three parts. The first part is to propose and verify the new method. The author does conventional usability test on Mykaka (Animation edition). The study exposes several problems of conventional usability testing method as low-efficiency, limited output and concealment of children's true feelings. Under the above-said circumstances, combined with literature review and analysis, the author puts forward a new method named constructive facilitation test. 16 children users from Dalian and Shanghai are selected to take part in the two tests through which the method is verified and existing usability problems are found. The second part is children behavior extraction and website construction guidelines proposal. First of all, the author conducts user interviews and questionnaires to get a basic understanding about children online activities and finds that similar problems with Mykaka also exist in other children websites. So it is significantly important to do further research on Mykaka. Then the author extracts the feature of preschool children's website behaviors and proposes guidelines for children Flash websites. The last part is Mykaka redesign and evaluation. According to the website construction guidelines, the author redesigns Mykaka website and makes the Interactive prototypes employing Flash technology and then evaluates them through cognitive walkthrough method. The results show that the redesigned website frame and content are better in line with children's cognitive style, thus the effect is improved and the guidelines are proved to be effective.The study indicates that usability engineering methods can be applied to the design, improvement and evaluation of children's products; in given conditions, better effects can be observed by using modified methods; children behaviors and guidelines based on user studies can be used to effectively supervise development for next phase.