Designing a product for a child is a much harder task than we first thought. Imagining something from another perspective can be tricky, especially when that perspective is so different from our normal one.
The persona's really helped with this task. We spent a lot of time thinking out our persona's and understanding their families and way of life. This really helped us target our product.
As a group we came up with some great ideas. Often ideas clashed and led to heated debate but this only helped everyone see everyone else's point of view. We spent a few weeks refining our prototype as we kept having new ideas or concepts of how it could be improved. We found that, before we started using formal techniques, we were constantly evaluating and redesigning and we were all really happy with our first prototype.
We were fortunate enough to have access to lots of parents with children of varying ages who we sent questionnaires to and the results were great. Overall the parents were very pleased with our product and one even offered their contact details in case we'd require funding to produce the product. They also offered some great criticism and made us realise that our original research and ideas about what a child was capable of were a little misguided. This led to us changing the age range and look for our product.
We found the heuristic evaluation and focus groups surprisingly helpful. This brought up loads of points we hadn't thought of in our original design. The results of these evaluation methods, combined with the results of the questionnaire made the task of redesigning what we thought was the perfect product much easier.
The product has evolved enormously since our first prototype and we are very happy with our final design. We feel that were our product actually made commercially available, it would be very beneficial for children providing them entertinment alongside education and that it would be well received by parents.
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