Musical Forest: A Multitouch Experience for Kids

jennifer November 17th, 2009

Us Artefactians regularly dabble in new user experiences outside of our daily client work that explore areas such as unfamiliar target audiences, new technologies, new UI mechanisms, or themes that spark our curiosity. As part of our experimentation platform, we recently added a shiny new multitouch display to our toolbox and were quickly inspired to set it up and start experimenting with it. Here’s what we did…

Musical Forest: an experiment in play and discovery

We have been doing a lot of work for a variety of kid age groups, so we decided to explore multitouch solutions for kids ages 3-5 years old for our first experiment with the new display. With this age group in mind, we designed and built a variety of features that helped facilitate “play” and “discovery” as the experience themes, invited kids to play, and asked them what they thought.

The experience

We set out to build a “Musical Forest” that included a variety of single-touch and multi-touch interactions. We wanted to focus on playful colors, sound and simple graphics that enticed our audience to play and discover what it can do.

As a result, we built a few main features:

1. A fruit tree that wiggled, popped, and enabled you to flick the fruit off of the tree.
2. Flowers that opened, closed, and encouraged you to “play” their petals like musical instruments
3. Background trees that allowed you to drag them around and discover the “fruit people” on them
4. Sound input, that allowed you to make the fruit fall off the trees if you increased the volume of your voice

 

Our learnings

Kids aren’t afraid to dive in
The kids that we interviewed were not afraid to dive in and start exploring the life-sized display from the get-go. Annet, one of the children we spoke to who is 4 years old, was excited at first glance and began to tap on the screen from the moment she saw it. She quickly started tapping every element that she could see with very limited hesitation.

Young kids don’t rely on multitouch
We originally set out to explore multitouch features such as two finger zoom. However, the kids who used our experiment never even attempted to use multitouch, so they never discovered these features. The only time multitouch was “technically” used was when multiple kids were using the system at the same time. Individually, however, they were interacting with the system using only 1 finger or their hand as a single touch point.

Kids love sound
Sound was used in a variety of ways in the experiment. One of the successes was using playful sounds as interaction feedback along with visual feedback to help the kids discover interactions. For example, when Annet tapped on a fruit element, it made a popping noise. She giggled and “popped” many fruit elements until she discovered that they could be dragged and thrown around.

The experiment also used the kids’ voice as input. The volume of their voices determined the size of the fruit. And, if the kids held their voice at a certain volume for a period of time, it would make all the fruit fall off the tree. This was wildly successful and one of the kids favorite features. In fact, they played with this feature throughout the entire session.

Kids are physical
Kids like to move around and use large physical gestures. During the interview, Annet would periodically stand up, then sit down, then stand up again. She also discovered that when she turned around, she could use her butt to “tap” on items and did this periodically throughout the interview.

Young kids like to learn from other kids
The youngest of the interviewees, Moritz, was 2 ½. At first, he was not as aggressive as the older kids in discovering what the system could do, but was very receptive to learning from them. For example, Annet would show Moritz how to use loud voices to make the fruit fall off the tree and she would show him how to make music with the flower petals. He would mimic her interactions, laugh, and enjoy the reaction. Ultimately, he was more apt to discover new things with Annet by his side showing him the ropes.

Entry Filed under: Interactive Installations, design