Elements Project Research
After deciding that my target audience will be children aged 8-10, I wrote up a User Research Survey to collect data that will be useful for me moving forward with my design.
I first created this survey as a PDF, then realised it may be easier to also format it in Google Forms and send it out to those willing to participate. This allowed for me to conduct the research remotely, as well as collect all of it in one place. This is also more accessible due to covid. Once I wrote up my questionnaire in Google Forms, I sent it to the parents of children within the required age group. I thought that this could be the best way to get responses as young children may find it difficult to read the questions and respond accordingly.
View the PDF: User Survey – Elements Project
Conducting the Research
I started off by asking the ages of the children responding. Out of seven responses, two were aged seven, three were aged eight and two were aged ten. This gave me a broader range of data to work with.
I then asked a few questions about Chemistry, and then also about the technology that the children use. This gave me a better idea of which platform to design the app for, as well as thing that the children would like to be included.
Planning
I started off by jotting down some questions that I thought may be useful to have the answers to in my research. I decided to do a mixture of both closed and open-ended questions in order to gain both qualitative and quantitative data to work with
Findings
From my research, I found that 71.4% of the children surveyed do not learn about Chemistry in school, and that none of them knew what the periodic table was.
To me, this means that there is a big gap in the market and that these children could really benefit from an app to educate them about the periodic table – especially since they’ll be required to learn it so soon in secondary school.
To my surprise, only one of the children interviewed uses a phone as their primary device, but 42.9% use a tablet – so this will be the format that I am going to design my app for.
100% of those interviewed said that they would benefit from having information read to them in an audio file. One said that this is because it would help with pronunciation, and a few others said that it is because they aren’t yet very strong readers – and so this would make information easier for them to digest and understand.
Here are some screenshots from my google forms results:
