Abstract:
Online education is increasingly gaining attention. Mobile apps are one of the best ways to get knowledge. Nowadays children spend a lot of their time on mobile/smart phones. Therefore efforts should be made to make this time beneficial for them. Child-psychology experts have not mentioned any side effect of mobile apps on children. There is need to develop interactive educational apps that engage children. As the kids are not so well aware of technology and unable to understand everything like elders so they need an interactive interface for their educational applications. The more interface is interactive more it is beneficial, useable, helpful and makes user connected. To make these apps more useful there is need to do usability testing of educational apps. Interface is one of the important factors for better usability. So, usability testing of user interface is greatly required. For this purpose, three educational apps for kids are selected for evaluation. In order to evaluate these educational apps survey, observation, interviews and questionnaires from children, parents and teachers are conducted and usability of these existing educational apps is evaluated. Results show that they have certain limitations and flaws. Keeping in consideration the importance of usability testing of user interface and limitations in existing framework, an updated framework for better usability of user interface is proposed for educational mobile applications for children and youngsters. This proposed framework will overcome usability issues of current educational apps. Using this framework educational app with more usability in user interface can be developed.
