User Interface of a Drawing App for Children: Design and Effectiveness

Abstract

Drawing is an integral part of child rearing. Nowadays, children use mobile apps to draw along with traditional mediums. We need to understand how children interact with drawing apps in order to develop apps that can facilitate their artistic and cognitive development. In this study, we tried to understand how children aged two to eight years interact with drawing apps and how should the user interface of such apps be designed. We developed a mobile app specifically for young children. The app provides children with a fixed-sized canvas, a limited color palette and few other features. We provided the app to 90 children between two and eight years of age and observed them when they used the app to draw. We observed that the two- and three-year-old children did not explore the features of the app and scribbled randomly typically with a single color. The four-to-six-year old children drew with multiple colors, were able to use the ‘Undo’ and ‘Redo’ options and liked to revisit their previous drawings. The seven- and eight-year-old children drew figures resembling real-world objects and were able to narrate stories about what they were drawing. The seven- and eight-year-old children were, however, frustrated by the lack of colors in the palette and the simplicity of the app. We conclude that age appropriate drawing apps may be helpful in child development.