 It's 2.15. I think I can, I'm safe to get started. Thanks everyone for coming to this talk. The title of it is Explain It to Me, Like Your Five, Learnings from User Research with Kids. So a quick introduction before I jump into it. I'm Cara Sayang. I work at MyPlanet, we're a software studio in Toronto, Canada. My background is actually in cognitive psychology. So I started my research experience doing some experimental psychology with adults and kids, which sounds really sketchy when I say it out loud, but I promise it wasn't that creepy. And then about five years ago, I moved into the tech and UX space and I've been really enjoying it since. So today I'm excited to talk to you about some of the things that I learned as we carried out some research with kids across a wide age span. So, oh, you can't hear me? Is this better? This is like really close. I'm just like getting up in here. Now you can all hear that? Is this better? Okay. So lots of you are probably already familiar with the different stages or types of research, but just so we can all get on the same page. I tend to think about early research in two separate stages. So first there's the discovery or utility research. And here you're looking to find out, what's the context of use for people who might be approaching your product? What are their needs or goals or pain points that they might have, the frustrations that they might have with existing tools in your space? So the goal here is to try to find users of your product, potential users, and just talk to them about what are some of the reasons why they might come to the product that you're trying to build. So for example, if you're thinking about building an e-learning tool, you might find people who are interested in using this type of product, and you might realize that you have people who fit into different categories. So perhaps some users are coming in because they're kind of like busy professionals who are trying to level up a little bit in their skill set, and they need to find really specific courses or really specific content that's gonna help them sort of demonstrate to their bosses that they've got what it takes to move on. But you might also find people who are just interested in learning for their own enjoyment, just to learn for a hobby or whatever. So these two types of people, even though they're doing really similar things in your tool, you might find that they come to it with very different mindsets. So one person might be kind of stressed and under a time crunch, whereas the other person might be a little bit less stressed, but they need more motivation to keep going to do the coursework. So doing this type of research can help you understand the types of features that you might wanna build there. You'll also wanna do a little bit of research around usability testing. So this is trying to figure out whether people can actually use the interface that you're trying to build. So what you're gonna do here is find your potential users and present them some interfaces. So this can be something as low fidelity as pencil and paper sketches that you're just putting in front of them, or it could be as high fidelity as an actually functioning website or product. And the goal here is just to get them to complete some common tasks that they might be required to do on the app or the site and just see where the pitfalls are, see where they're stumbling over some of the workflows. Maybe some things are hard to find. Doing this type of testing can help you identify those issues early on. So that's user research in general, but why might you wanna research with kids in specific? So this poor guy might have benefited from some user research there. So obviously if your product is aimed at kids, you're gonna wanna talk to them to understand their goals and motivations, which are gonna be quite different than maybe their parents or their teachers or adults around them. But when it comes to usability testing, that's gonna be important for anybody or you talk to any product that you build, but I'd argue that it's especially important for children because they have a lot of different expectations when it comes to their digital interactions. So they might expect things to be a lot more vibrant and exciting and dynamic than an adult would. Excuse me. But they might also just lack the mental models or the internet experience that adults have to deal with some common patterns. So for example, we found that kids had, even like in their tweens, had a really hard time with the concept of filtering so they weren't really able to understand the term or the concept, even though things like favoriting or playing content was really easy for them. So testing was something that allowed us to find that. But even if you're building something that isn't directly marketed for children, it can be a good idea to do some testing with kids just to find sort of these auxiliary effects that you might not otherwise notice. So one category of products like this might be something like smart home speakers like Google Home or Amazon Echo. These things aren't marketed for kids. They're not intended for kids to use or just adult products but they do live in places and homes where kids live and learn and also say some pretty strange things. So we're hearing some reports of user delight where kids are asking Alexa to tell me a chicken joke or make noise a dinosaur makes and it's like a really fun thing for them to do. But we also come across some instances where the kids are asking Alexa to do things but because they're not enunciating in a way that an adult would, Alexa misinterprets it and then comes back with some results that are like really, really sketchy and not something that you want your kid to be hearing. So doing a little bit of extra research with kids can help you identify those bonus moments of delight that you might not have expected but it can also help you sort of catch those issues of safety or like inappropriateness that might not have come up if you had only talked to your adult subject pools. And then there's also a side effect of testing with kids where if you make something so easy that a kid could use it you inadvertently also make it easy enough for everyone to use it. So this might be a regular adult who's using your product but is distracted maybe and not really focusing on your interface. It could be someone who doesn't read or speak the language of your product very easily or it could just be someone who's got a physical or a cognitive impairment. So by making sure that a kid could use this product you also inadvertently make it a little bit easier for everyone else to use it. And I wanna be clear that like if you're building a product that's specifically meant for a special population to use you shouldn't talk to kids instead of that special population. You should still just reach out to people in that community that's always gonna be the best way to go. But I'm hoping that some of the methodologies that I talk about today is gonna help you as sort of a starting point for doing that research. You can tweak some of the methodologies and use them for other special populations as well. To give a little bit of context on some of the examples that I'll be using today. A lot of this work comes out of work that we're doing with Girl Guides of Canada which is a great nonprofit organization up in Canada just like how Girl Scouts is down here in the States. And we're currently working with them to move all of their programming and activity content from basically paper booklets that they hand out to their girl members which is not the best format to work with. We're trying to get that all onto a digital platform. So our design challenge with this project is that the girl members can range in age from five all the way up to 17. So we're hoping to build something or we're trying to build something where it's as easy enough and interesting enough and fun enough that a five year old might theoretically wanna use it but it's also not alienating for a 17 year old they're not gonna go in there and be like, okay, this is for babies, I don't wanna use it. And then finally the adult facilitators need to go in there to plan their meetings. So it needs to be something that's robust enough for them to use. So with that in mind, we carried out both the discovery research and the usability research with kids which is what I'll be talking about today. All right, so once you've decided that you do wanna do some user research with kids what are you gonna do first? So you're gonna need to decide how you do your testing whether you wanna do it in person or remotely. And both of these have their pros and cons. So when you do in person testing you're almost always gonna get richer data. So you can see their expressions or body language how they're reacting to things. And this is gonna tell you a lot more than what they're just staying to you over the phone or even over Skype. This is especially important when you're dealing with kids because some of them might not articulate their thoughts as clearly as an adult might. So they might be shy, they might be hesitant. So removing that sort of barrier of having to speak over the phone is gonna help them. You're also gonna be able to see the actual environment that kids are using your product in. So maybe this is like a crazy home environment where their sibling is trying to like yank their iPad away from them or maybe it's at school where they only have like 20 minutes at the school library computer to use it. Being able to see that in person is gonna help you sort of realize things in your design that you might not otherwise have thought to think about. But remote testing is gonna have its benefits as well. So you can much more easily reach a larger variety of demographics. So you can go to rural areas, you can go across the country, reach kids who speak a different language than maybe in your immediate area. So that's gonna mean that's faster for you. And sometimes it's easier to recruit just because parents don't have to worry about bringing their kids to your office. You don't have to like go into their homes. They don't have to worry about that. So it can be a lower barrier for entry there. And for our work, we did a mix of the two. So we did stick with in-person sessions for the kids under 10 just because we wanted to make sure that they'd be able to stay focused and that there wouldn't be any communication issues that way. But for the older kids, we did interview and test them separately, remotely and in-person. All right, so once you've decided that you wanna test in-person or remotely or maybe both, you're gonna need to find some users. So for those of you who have tried to source adult participants who fit a demographic, you might realize that it is, quite frankly, a pain in the butt. I'm not gonna lie, it can be challenging. So the thought of finding kids to participate in your research might seem really daunting and you might be like, okay, how am I gonna do this? Not like this, the Hunger Games approach is like the opposite of what I would suggest. Don't do that. In our case, we were lucky to work with a really amazing client who tapped into their own user groups. So we set them up with some email templates and outreach describing what we needed and they were able to go talk to their girl members and find the people that fit our criteria. But even in this kind of blue sky, perfect dream scenario where someone else is doing all the hard work, it still took us about two or three weeks to get things set up, so make sure you leave yourself a lot of lead time for that. But even if you don't have an amazing client to work with, there are other ways to source users for research. Look to your own contacts. If you've got any access to extracurricular groups, try to leverage that. So if you know parents who've got kids in soccer or music or drama camp or whatever, go to them, explain your research and see if they might be interested in talking to other parents in that community and sort of hand out a little one pager that just describes the sort of bare bones of your research and ask parents to contact you that way. You can also spam your social media networks. Look to special social media groups where there are certain groups that are just for moms or dads within certain areas. It's becoming more common to have social media groups that just focus on market research topics, so they're just groups where these opportunities are posted frequently, so that can be a good place to go. And don't be afraid to take it into the real world either. So go to places where young families are likely to hang out, so like community pools, local places of worship, yoga studios, I don't know, you can be creative about that, but put up that one pager again, briefly describing what the research is about, the ages of the kids you're looking for, contact information and any incentives that are involved. So when I say incentives, I mean things like gift cards or perhaps cash for the parents and then they can decide whether or not they wanna share it with the kid, but just put that up there so that our parents are able to see it. That's a good way to get people. Another maybe slightly less conventional approach is to approach daycares. So for some of the work I did in university, actually just cold-cold a bunch of daycares, gave them a mini-pitch of my research project and said, you know, is this something that you think the parents of the kids at your daycare would be interested in? And in some cases, the daycares around the university, I wasn't even the first person to ask, so they had already had kind of a process set up for that, so they were able to set me up in a room and just kind of bring this mini parade of children into the testing sessions, which was amazing, because you get so much done in a day. So that can be one way to go. If you're very lucky, you could try the same thing with schools, but of course there's gonna be a lot more red tape involved with that just because of the school boards and whatnot. And then finally, you can always resort to recruitment agencies, there's no shame in it, especially if you're looking for really hard to find populations like kids with certain developmental issues or whatever. That's gonna be a place that you might wanna decide to spend money instead of your own resources and get someone to set that up for you. If all of this seems like a lot of work, that's because it can be, I'm not gonna lie, but once you get the ball rolling and you get your template set up, your next rounds of recruitment are gonna go a lot faster. And I would also suggest that you recruit way more people than you think you need for your first round, because this way you're gonna be able to build up a pool of participants that you can tap into again and again as you do your iterative research. And people also just cancel, kids get sick, they go on vacations, whatever. This will give you a little bit of backup that you can rely upon. All right, so when it comes to preparing the questions that you will ask as your participants are trickling in, you're gonna wanna prepare your user research guides. And for the younger kids we talked to, we found that they were really much more able to answer concrete questions than hypothetical ones. So some kids might have trouble with questions that ask them to sort of extrapolate or project upon what they think other people are gonna say or do or what their peers are gonna think. And this can be true for neurotypical kids as well, depending on the age, but in one instance we had a parent ask to review the testing guides ahead of time because her teenager was on the autism spectrum and she was worried that we were gonna be asking her questions, put her on the spot and say, oh, what do you think your friends would think about this or how do you think they would react to this? And she didn't think that her child would feel comfortable with those types of scenarios. So I'm not saying that you can't ever ask about hypothetical scenarios. I'm just saying that even younger kids can vary quite a lot in terms of their ability, so you may luck out and find participants that are able to answer it, but just be prepared going in that they might struggle a bit. So just have maybe a more concrete version of that question in your back pocket so that you can pull that out if you need to. Another example of this came up when I was drafting some intro questions to ask at the start of the research session. So in my foolish past, I thought, this is an easy low ball question. We're just jamming, we're just gonna chat. It'll be, there's no wrong answers, it's super easy. As it turns out, this was a terrible idea. I mean, if you asked me what's the best part about being a woman or a designer, it would take me a while to come up with an answer to that. So to ask a six-year-old person to just answer that on the spot was in hindsight quite foolish. But we had much better luck with questions like what's your favorite subject in school or what's your favorite video game or TV show. Kids were way more enthusiastic about questions like this and often just pulled out their mom's iPhone to show us the game right in the moment. So not only did this serve the purpose of being able to warm up the kid and get them kind of involved in the session, it also gave us some design inspiration. So one of the girls said her favorite subject in school was science because they did explosions and she's sort of like explosions. Another girl said she really liked math because people don't think girls are good at math but she was good at math and that made her feel really proud about it. So hearing these types of things, it didn't help us like design specific UI elements but it did put us in the right mindset to say, you know, what are some of the feelings or the sensations or emotions that we want this product to trigger when girls are using it? So we got a lot of sort of the loftier inspiration from these types of answers. And this example of me having come up with a really bad question to start out with is a great example of why it's important to pilot test your test guide and really your whole process. So recruit one or two more kids and you think you actually need for your session. Schedule them a day or two in advance of your actual research kicking off just to give yourself a bit of time to test out the user test, basically user test your user test and make sure that things are gonna go smoothly. That'll give you some time to tweak your answers if you need to. And as well, we always recommend that you go into these sessions with a buddy with another person testing with you. It's gonna make it a lot easier to handle notes because it's really weird to be like talking to a six-year-old and frantically scribbling down your notes. It's gonna help setting up your recordings if you're doing any of that. So doing a pilot test will help you and your research buddy figure out what's the best way to have that sort of cadence there. All right, so you've recruited your people, you've set up all your testing guides, you're ready to go. So let's talk about some things that are gonna make your research sessions go more smoothly. So before you start doing anything else, right after you do your intros, it'll be really important to frame the research session. And this is true for everybody, but it's especially important for kids who may not have done anything like this before in the past. Just tell them what to expect that they're prepared. Let them know that they can ask questions, they can stop if they get tired, they don't have to continue if they really don't want to. Informed consent, even for kids, is important. So trying to put it in terms that they understand is really crucial. And if you're gonna ask about any potentially sensitive topics or even just wanna ask them about things that they don't like about a certain experience, let them know that no one's gonna get in trouble based on what they say. No one's gonna get their feelings hurt, that there are no bad answers. Kids can be quite susceptible to what's called a social desirability effect. So the desire to say something that they think is socially acceptable or what's considered a good answer that they should be giving. And that's not what we want. We want them to give their honest feedback. So by really emphasizing that nothing bad is gonna come out of this session can hopefully open up that space that they feel safe enough to talk about it. And then when you're ready to start things off, it's a nice way to break the ice and get kids to warm up to you by offering them a choice of activities. So we had a more energetic option and a quieter one, just some kids are a little bit more reserved or sometimes the sort of setup of the testing room doesn't allow for a lot of like crazy Elaine dancing. But kids did love the freeze dance and they all love Katy Perry for some reason. So make sure you have some songs downloaded and ready to go there. Yeah, you'll feel pretty dumb dancing with like a second grader, if you're not a parent or someone who's around kids all the time, I'm not. But they're not judging you so just let loose and let your inner Elaine fly. Having a parent there might also help a lot. Just be sure to ask them ahead of time to be silent observers so that their responses and their, you know, they don't like reach out and do the thing for the kid. Let them know that this is about the child's reactions and then you can always include them at the end. Just save a couple of minutes to ask for their feedback so that they don't feel excluded. When you're asking more discovery or exploratory questions, often with adults will say things like, oh right, how difficult this was or how easy it was on a scale of one to five. Kids might have trouble grasping that concept especially younger ones. So we would recommend using something like these face scales. In this case, we were rating difficulty or, you know, who should be involved in planning your meetings? Should it be girls only, guys only, or both? But you can make the scales really reflect almost anything that you want. So you might say things like, you know, is this fun or boring? Is this something you like or something that you hate? So using something like this can make it a little bit easier for kids or anyone who's struggling with language for whatever reason to express their thoughts. When it comes to actually testing the UI, testing the interface, again, I wanna emphasize the importance of framing here especially since now you're asking a kid to do a task which they can ostensibly fail at doing. So tell them that it's okay if they don't know how to do something or get confused that they're allowed to ask you or just say I don't know and that that's something wrong with doing that. Just as when you're testing with adults, you wanna really convey the idea that the kids aren't the ones being tested. You're just trying to find out if the prototype itself is easy enough for a kid to use. So you really wanna get that across. And you also wanna keep the language as simple as possible. So don't actually say the word prototype which I would be amazed if a kid knows. Don't say usable or feedback or any of these terms that we rely on with our adult participants. You might say things like a pretend website or your thoughts and feelings instead of feedback just to keep things really simple and easy for people to understand. And we found that it was also useful to show them an example of what placeholder content is. So often when we're testing at the wireframe level we don't have all our assets, nothing's polished. And you can say fill or a placeholder but a kid might not get that. So to just show them what it looks like and say you might see some gray boxes that look like this but that's just because we don't have pictures yet eventually we're gonna put pictures there. That can just give them a heads up so that they don't get thrown off when they see these sort of like schematic diagrams. When it comes to setting up your prototype itself try to make it as realistic as you can and link up as many states as you can more than you might when you're testing with an adult. Kids are way more willing and way more likely to just kind of go crazy on your prototype and click all the things and explore all the things because that's just kind of how they use the internet. So things can go pretty far off the path that you the happy path that you intend. So make sure that you've got a really quick way to reset the prototype or get people back to key screens so that you can get your testing back on track and try to use realistic icons in imagery where possible. This is gonna be hugely important especially if kids are still learning to read they're really gonna be relying on visuals to navigate through. So spend a little bit more time on that. And give positive feedback. I think some schools of thinking around research say that you shouldn't give feedback about whether a user has or hasn't completed a task properly but for a kid especially that can feel really weird to have an adult not responding to the things you say click the button and they do it and you don't actually say good work or nice job. So I think so long as you're not overly pulling them or pushing them towards a certain response giving a little positive feedback along the way can help things go more smoothly. And then finally just to cover off some more logistic items that cropped up. So here's a photo of me and my colleague Jessie after one of her inter-home sessions. The family was super nice and they had this adorable pug that became obsessed with us during the session. Like at one point like he's still creeping us in the window at one point like he was on my lap and I was trying to type over him with it was crazy but it was really, really fun. So that's one reason that you wanna dress informally you don't wanna wear a suit to get it covered in cat hair but you also I say you should dress like a camp counselor because you don't wanna come across as like authority figure that's really scary and the kids are gonna have to like report to. You just wanna seem like a friendly person who's there to chat with them. For in-home testing be prepared for pets or siblings. If you're allergic to pets or siblings, make your preparations, bring your whatever you need or ask the parents to keep the pets in a separate room if that's gonna be an issue. Bring a mouse and download your prototype. So that was something we learned early. Obviously you might not have wifi access at the person's house so make sure everything is local on your computer if you're using one. Also kids don't always know how to use a track pad they're much more likely to use touch screens or maybe have a mouse. So having a mouse avoids having weird track pad issues hold up your testing. Be sure to leave lots of time to get between places families run late often. And it's also really nice to have prizes for kids so long as they're not food based or something like stickers or toys were really helpful. And at the end of the day have fun. I mean if you're building a product for kids it's probably a fun product so try to bring some of that into your own design. Kids are gonna be really enthusiastic about working with your interface or really loudly bored about it if that's what it is but either way you're gonna get great feedback they're gonna give you great sound bites like our friend Kiana who said you know we showed that to the client it was hilarious. So open yourself up to being inspired by the kids that you're talking to and bring some of that wonder and creativity into your own process. Thanks.