Examining the User Experience (UX) of Children’s Interaction with Arabic Interfaces in Educational Learning Contexts

A plethora of research studies have recently examined different approaches for designing playful learning interactive systems. The design challenges of offering fun, engaging and creative learning experiences for children are often coupled with complexities in objectively measuring the impact of different designs with younger populations. Consequently, the evaluation of children’s experience with playful learning websites is essential for designing and improving these interactive systems to comply with the child’s cognitive, physical, and perceptual abilities. This paper reports the results of an experimental study conducted on a sample of 64 children in an elementary school in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Its aim was to explore and analyze the user experience (UX) on Arabic educational and entertainment website de-signed for children ranging in age from 7 to 12 years. To help understand the children better and gather impression data about how they use these types of websites, observation and heuristic evaluations have been used. Observational analysis included metrics for measuring UX and usability during interaction with the web pages to understand the efficacy of these evaluation approaches in uncovering general usability issues and opportunities for design improvements. The study took place in the school’s computer lab where each child interacted with the website separately from her mates. Questionnaires were designed specifically to assess the momentum emotion of the user while interacting with different sections of the website. Also, children were provided with sticky notes to freely describe their experience, perceptions, and opinions about the website. The results of our study showed that the age of the child interacting with the website has a significant impact on how she experienced the different sections in each web page. Methodological design implications for conducting UX and usability evaluations for children are discussed.