A Usability Study with Children on an Online Educational Platform

Abstract

Online education has become widely popular in the last decade. Although there are various online educational portals for children in the World and in Turkey, the number of usability studies focusing on the needs of children is limited. This study aims to fill this gap. The study focuses on Vitamin online educational platform in Turkey and investigates the find and search strategies that child users employ when navigating in the web site. A qualitative usability test with a multi-method approach was conducted with a sample of 12 Turkish students between the ages of 9-13. Observations were made while the participants were executing the given tasks. Additional data was collected by using the retrospective think aloud procedure, pre-test survey and video recordings. The findings showed that several improvements can be made in terms of information architecture in order to improve the usability of the platform for children.