Bean Blog

When introducing a group of preschoolers to the wonders of a touchscreen computer, be sure to bring plenty of handy wipes!

One of the best parts of my job is getting to go out and actually see the sites and interactives that we create in use by our target audience, so I was particularly excited to be testing a new set of interactive games with a group of preschoolers. I *love* doing testing with kids… adults tend to “think” too much about everything whereas little kids just “do” (kids are also brutally honest, which always keeps us on our toes). In this case, the “do” was to interact with our games by touching the screen of a shiny (hence the need for the wipes), new touchscreen computer. 

We did testing with two groups of kids. One group was a collection of middle-class kids with varying degrees of exposure to computers (I knew this going in) and the other was a group of preschoolers in a lower income Head Start center with unknown exposure to computers (I learned later that their exposure to computers was minimal).

In this age of interactive whiteboards in classrooms, touchscreen kiosks in museums and of course, the preponderance of iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation, I figured there was a good chance that most of the kids would take the direction of “touch the screen” as a perfectly normal request. While a couple of the kids did so with nary a second thought, the majority gave us a quizzical “you want me to do what?” look. Some asked for the mouse, some just sat there and some touched the screen so lightly they wouldn’t have popped a soap bubble. And while we definitely saw that trepidation continue longer in the kids who had less computer experience, they all caught on remarkably fast! We found that using instructions like “press the screen like you press the button on a phone” were extremely successful in moving kids past their initial fears that they would somehow break the screen if they tapped too hard. Once the fear was gone, they jumped in with both feet, er, hands… literally. Once they discovered the awesome power they controlled with their wee little fingers, they wanted more – one little girl attempted some very intricate multi-touch maneuvers and was quite perturbed to find the single-touch screen couldn’t keep up with her. Outside of the occasional hiccup with the screen not detecting a couple little tiny fingers, all the kids were soon tap-tap-tapping and dragging things across the screen. Some had even perfected the “flick” method of moving objects by the time they were done. Apple can thank us later for pre-training their future customers.

The overall “cool factor” of the touchscreen was definitely not lost on any of the kids. Both groups identified “touching the screen” as one of their favorite parts of the games (thankfully, they said they liked the games themselves too… whew!). None wanted to stop when asked and even fewer wanted to wanted to give up their seats when their time was up. Hard to say if that was due to the super cool touchscreen computer or our super cool games… regardless, we have no doubt permanently skewed their expectations of how they should be able to interact with a computer… or a game… or a website… 

To the parents of our testing kids – I have some extra handy wipes. You’re gonna need them.