Contents

1. About the Product
2. Introduction
3. Key for the User Interface Breakdown
4. Usability Issues Identified During Audit
5. Recommendations
6. Conclusions

1. About the Product

WordPuddle is an app that envisions helping parents and children with learning disabilities or difficulties, aged from reception to primary 7, school age. The app would assist children with improving skills in reading, writing and emotional intelligence. The app would consist of children's illustrated story books available on a variety of topics. I also envisage providing opportunities and platforms for new authors and illustrators. This library of books will be from established and new authors and illustrators who belong to neurodiverse and neurotypical groups. The children will be able to access various fun and engaging books, find phonics and spelling lessons, mini-games, and activities, for example, augmented reality features and more. WordPuddle app would feature some special accessibility features that a child with a learning difficulty can utilise and make the content personalised as per their own needs and comfort, for example, Bionic reading, dyslexia fonts, screen brightness mode, etc.

2. Introduction

The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate how heuristic evaluation will help gain needful feedback on the app that the design team may take on board to further improve the experience for its end user using it. I will be using the usability rules and analysis to find the pros and cons of the WordPuddle app. I conducted my tests on three young internet users. The three children fall into the age bracket of 5 to 7 years, 8 to 10 years & 11 to 12 years each. The questions for each age group needed to be different too based on their age and ability.

3. Key for the User Interface Breakdown

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4. Usability Issues Identified During Audit

| | Issue | Key | Heuristic Value Violated[1] | Severity | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | 1 | Child’s home page - book covers are difficult to see | 6 | 8 | 1 | | 2 | New icons introduced like - reading companion. Unsure what it is. | 6 | 2 | 1 | | 3 | How to go back to home page from lesson’s page? No home button | 12, 13, 14, 15 | 1 | 2 | | 4 | ‘My Records’ section - what does those numbers mean? | 6 | 2 | 1 | | 5 | Age group category or mention is required for the books so the users know what age the book belongs to. | 10 | 2 | 2 | | 6 | | | | | | 7 | | | | | | 8 | | | | | | 9 | | | | | | 10 | | | | | | | | | | |

[1] See Nielsen's heuristic values in Appendices for context of which rules were violated.