User Testing with a 5 year old

I had my 5 year old nephew do some user testing.

http://petty-about-books.herokuapp.com/

He is still new to reading but can read. He had zero interest in engaging with anything written on the screen. This made him a really useful test case to reveal info about interaction cues and joyful play.

First he really enjoyed just tapping the books and having the green show up. He spent about 30 seconds just doing this back and forth. When exploring, he never thought that there could be a horizontal scroll and never accidentally triggered it. When I showed it to him, he used it a bit but it wasn’t the most fun part.

I also had to show him to scroll down and interact with the book covers below. He did not notice that the covers populated or had changed.

When he started interacting with the book cover, he had the same reaction my daughter did when drawing. “How can I erase?” When I showed him about the erase button, he then wanted to explore pushing buttons and pushed through all of the interactions without trying them. So I had to demonstrate the cadence of button, interact, button, interact. I’m trying to address this learning problem with language that encourages exploration, but it will be interesting to see if it’s a problem with users who read.

He really enjoyed drawing on top of the book cover. When there was a face on the book cover, he seemed to enjoy the experience more. (Something I definitely agree with!)

His touch interaction was a bit hampered by a monster band-aid on his pointer finger, but he seemed to enjoy it regardless. The interaction he liked the most was the stickers. On mobile, it forces you to drag and draw which is more fun than placing them. (This is also possible on desktop, but users really have to discover it.) He also really like what he called the “blurrr.” For him, blurring out the words was a big part of what made it fun.

Overall, he spent about 5 minutes interacting with it. He needed me to guide him through a few of the transitions, but was giggling throughout about what he made.

Paid-for Testing

I also paid for a more official user test through a tester on fiverr. I hadn’t done this before and it was really interesting to see the results.

In the world of website usability testing, this project is a bit of an odd duck. Without a specific goal or user flow, it was difficult to articulate what I wanted from the user test. I ended up giving the tester very little direction or framing for what or why this website was created. I asked them to try their best to just articulate the inner dialog around what they were experiencing. It helped me realize that the thing that I’ve been trying to design with this project was “an inner narrative.” I want the user to be pushed into an internal performance that may or may not align with how they actually feel.

The experience was great! I wasn’t expected for how joyful it was to watch someone else interact with what I had made. While the poor tester was certainly confused and unsure about the what and the why, they seemed to enjoy exploring. There were plenty of moments when they laughed, which is what I was most concerned about. So to me, it felt like a successful result.

Post User Test Updates

Based on what I observed, I extended the “bookshelf” to run off of the screen and scaled the items down so you get a partial view of the third book. I’m hoping this gives the user more of an indication that this section is scrollable.

I also moved the footer from always being at the bottom of the screen to forcing a space for the canvas to go. I’m hoping that the sudden appearance of the book covers into a blank space provokes enough curiousity to encourage the user to scroll down and start to interact with the book cover.