Designing eLearning for children: Creating Child-Friendly Educational Interfaces

Designing eLearning for children can present one of the most significant and rewarding challenges, and creating interfaces that resonate with young learners remains both an art and a science. In this piece, we explore what is possible by using a prehistoric minigame built using Storyline 360 as an example.

Understanding the child's perspective
When designing for children, every element must serve both an educational and experiential purpose. Colour psychology plays a crucial role in children's learning interfaces. While adults might appreciate subtle, minimalist designs, children respond more positively to bold, clear visual hierarchies. We also chose to use chunky, simple shapes in order to not overcomplicate visuals.

When designing the graphics, we opted for vibrant colours with a particular emphasis on the one main colour for each of the time periods. For example, deep blues for the ocean, and various shades of green for the jungle. This choice wasn't merely aesthetic – it creates an immersive learning environment and the colours help kids retain information about each time period.

Making Navigation Intuitive and Engaging

One of the most challenging aspects of educational interface design is creating navigation that's both readily comprehensible and not over-complicated. We tackled this challenge through several approaches:

1. Interactive Timeline Navigation: A slider featuring a dinosaur character helps users move between different prehistoric periods. This design choice transforms what could have been a boring chronological navigation into an engaging interactive element.

2. Visual Feedback: Hover states on clickable dinosaurs provide immediate feedback to young users so they can easily tell when they’ve selected a specific object on the screen.

3. Animations: Strategic use of animation, such as a pulsing trilobite, draws attention to important elements without creating distraction. These subtle movements create a dynamic feel while serving as visual cues for the user to know what to interact with.

Accessibility: The Foundation of Inclusive Learning

We made sure we were catering to as many diverse learning styles and needs as possible. While building we made sure to include:

- Visual Learning:  Lot of images and clear text boxes to accompany them, providing written instructions and information.

- Auditory Learning: AI-generated voice narration supports text content and helps children who may struggle with reading or have visual impairments. We used ElevenLabs for the AI generated voice, which we find works excellently to generate realistic AI voices at scale.

- Interactive Learning: Clickable elements and timeline navigation encourage active engagement through play.

This multi-sensory approach ensures that children with different learning styles can engage with the content regardless of their needs. It's a reminder that accessibility in educational design is about creating richer learning experiences for all users.

Clear User Instructions: Finding the Balance

When designing for younger users, it’s important to ensure instructions are clear, while also not being overbearing. Children will often want to play and explore on their own, and tend to get bored or frustrated if they’re being told what to do at every turn. We tried to strike a balance with this by including:

- Contextual Help: Text boxes provide just-in-time guidance about selecting dinosaurs and navigating timelines. These however only appear once at the beginning to set the user up.

- Familiar Patterns: Standard interface elements, like the 'X' button for closing windows, help build on existing user knowledge.

- Reset Options: Easily accessible reset functionality allows for risk-free exploration

Looking to the Future

As educational technology continues to evolve, the principles of child-friendly interface design become increasingly important. The success of educational software depends not just on the quality of its content, but on how effectively that content is presented to young learners.

Our Age of Dinosaurs project is an example of how thoughtful design choices can transform educational content into an engaging, accessible, and most of all, funlearning experience. By combining bright colors, intuitive navigation, multi-modal content delivery, and strategic interaction design, we believe we have created a piece that can really get children engaged in learning.

Creating interfaces for young minds requires a delicate balance of education and engagement, and instruction and exploration. When we get this balance right, we create more than just educational tools – we create gateways to inspire young minds to explore, learn, and grow.

Check out our Age of the Dinosaurs project here:

Are you working with children or looking for engaging ways of using technology to support learning in a different environment? We’d love to understand your approach to engaging learners of all ages, so get in touch at team@konnektis.com or through one of our eLearning social channels.