3a - "User Need Analysis": Second Major meeting (About week ago)

Following the trip to what turned out to be ‘The Entertainer’ and the ‘The Early Learning Centre‘ we had had some hands on experience of what current children of all ages get to play with. One toy that stuck out after this journey was the drawing tablet that allows a child to draw whatever they like and simply erase it with the slide of a lever (can be seen in one of the photos from the trip). This kind of toy is great because it allows the user to be as imaginative and creative as they like with drawing or writing and must surely help them develop some cognitive and physical skills. It also had a very obvious link with one of the ideas that we had had the week before, that being the digital cartoon drawing thing.

The trip had made us think a bit about the age group we were interested in pursuing, and that the younger the child the more interesting the design of their toys, because it requires so much more thought about what it can provide the child with, as the earlier stages in their life are where such massive development happens to them. We were thinking of narrowing our age band to 1 to 3 / 4 years old.

So we started thinking that we could design a modified version of the hand held cartoon drawing thing for a younger generation, so we went back to the drawing board on that, and with it we took the realisation that with the whole car seat idea we hadn’t decided anything specific for the entertainment that we had decided it would have, so why not make it this??

What we came up with was…

A hand held console, where a tft style touch screen would be the main focus, where all of the main interactive graphics would be displayed, so that the user could press things that appear on it and make things happen. The console would come with attachments so that it could be connected to car seats and prams, etc. but still portable so that the child could play with it anywhere. That’s the basis of the idea, I’ll list the other properties that we thought up for it;

• It would have to be chunky, smooth and very strong
• Would have to be easy to clean
• Would have to be very colourful, in addition to this the whole console will be made out of some high tech material that would change colour depending on what application was being run on it / just what was being done on it in general
• Would run several applications, all designed with the intention of being fun and educational
• Has a big chunky pen to write on the screen with
• Has to be light weight
• Has to be battery powered
• We want to avoid having side controllers like most hand held consoles do, but maybe have big buttons that could show images or something
• The possibility of having some kind of Bluetooth link up ability for two player software has been suggested, but we don’t know how sound an idea that is yet.

Those are some general properties and I’m sure it’s relatively clear where those designs ideas would have come from, with the product being for young children. Basically we want it to be bold and beautiful so that the aesthetics appeal to young children. We want it to be real tactile and chunky, as children can’t be expected to have particularly well developed motor control. We obviously want it to be very safe, and usable wherever so it has to be very strong.

What kind of things would be on it is the next issue, and we had a wide variety of ideas about that as follows;

• Following the drawing idea it would have to have some kind of drawing program on it, allowing the user to draw or write whatever they liked. Also the possibility of importing (in a simple way) set cartoon images and the like would be good.
• A program to read stories to the child would be good. A good way to do this would be to have real voiced children’s stories be played along with cartoon images of the story on screen as the story unfolds to animate it. It would also display the words in text on the screen and highlight which are being spoken as the story progresses like a karaoke machine, to aid the child’s reading. If the child could press on the words as they appear and they would be repeated that would be good. This strikes as a good logical step on and combination of standard children’s books where there are words and pictures, and story telling where a speaker voices the books, maybe showing the pictures as they go.
• In The Early Learning Centre we saw a game where a number of pairs of pictures we stored under windows and the game is to uncover a window see it’s picture and try and guess and later remember where the pair to it is, with the goal being to find the pairs. This is a game that has very obvious ability to be transported onto am electronic interface like that proposed, and is designed to help children’s observation and memory skills.
• In the same shop we saw a game where you press plastic animal heads and the sound they make is played. That would be very transferable and has multiple extensions that could be done too. For example the console could present a picture of an animal, and the user would have to spell it’s name using the pen, or they may have to speak it’s name and that could be picked up by the console, whereby the system could tell them if they are right or present the correct answer back to them.
• A simple writing game would be a good addition, whether it is as simple as the child is presented with a picture and asked to write what it is, or whether it is more of a guess / logic based game like hangman. Something like this would be a great addition for benefiting language skills. The whole writing thing could be done by either the pen and hand writing on the screen, or an on screen alphabet would be possible for this, it would all depend on it the child had started writing yet or not. Maybe which is used for game could be set by the parents so that the console could be more useful.

Other simple puzzle games, on board comics and various other things were also discussed, and we feel we are getting a good stating point here. A couple of things to note, however, is that some of these software ideas may apply more to certain ages than others, so they may not all be useful, or perhaps the console could be developed with the intention of being used for a range of ages, with different software for each, that would certainly provide better value for money. Also there is no mention of operating system above, not because it was ignored, just that before we start top restrain our idea with technical issues we want to explore a range of things first.