Mobile app developers long past their childhood days may once again be singing: “can you tell me how to get… how to get to Sesame Street?”
As part of an ongoing industry-wide effort to foster more kid-friendly apps for the iPad, the nonprofit group that also happens to produce the beloved children’s series “Sesame Street” has come forward and released a new set of developer guidelines to aid mobile app developers in this effort.
“Educators at Sesame Workshop noticed that kids tend to hold their tablet in landscape mode, for example, and rest their palms on the bottom,” All Things D reports. “That means that if app makers put icons at the bottom of the screen, kids are far more likely to click on something accidentally.”
Also, while kids love the interactivity that mobile device apps can bring, it is easy for the story to be lost if everything can be clicked on all the time.
“In the storybook, we know that kids can often get distracted by all the bells and whistles,” says Mindy Brooks, director of education and research for Sesame Workshop. According to Brooks, developers can help mitigate the distractions by requiring the young reader to “listen to the full text on a page before the added features are enabled.”
“We want to make all preschool apps better for kids,” Brooks tells All Things D, adding that suggestions contained in the guidelines were also drawn from information gleaned through some 50 studies on how children most commonly interact and engage with mobile devices.
To check out the guidelines from Sesame Street, click here.
