Background I: Apps for infants and toddler
The existing literature suggests that young children may benefit from using computers under the right circumstances. At the same time, it is clear that we know very little about the use of computers by children under the age of three, and even less for children under the age of two.
– Hourcade et al. (2015)
Hourcade et al. (2015) analyzed 208 videos on YouTube in order to assess the use of tablets by infants and toddlers. They found, amongst other things, that before 12 months of age, most (but not all) infants were using both hands or multiple fingers rather than single fingers and specific gestures like tap and swipe:
Now, this is no surprise. It takes time for children to develop precise enough motor skills for how tablet touch-UIs are designed to be used. Some apps for infants do try to work around it by encouraging full hand interaction or the microphone but this comes at the cost of limiting the fidelity and intentionality of the interaction. That is, if the expected input is coarse and imprecise, you can’t make too much out of it or risk output appearing random to the user.
What if we could design a user interface specifically for infants to use, one that leveraged some other faculty or sense that develops earlier than touch – would infants be able to use it then, and perhaps more importantly, would they want to?
Bibliography
Hourcade et al. (2015) “Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets”