Designing websites for kids is a fascinating, challenging, rewarding, and exasperating experience: You’re trying to create a digital experience for people who lack the cognitive capacity to understand abstraction. You’re trying to establish brand loyalty with people who are influenced almost exclusively by their peers. And you’re trying to communicate subjective value propositions to people who can only see things in black-and-white.
Add to this the need to collect data from people with a deep-seated fear of sharing personal information, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Let’s remember, too, that these people are still learning how to read, and haven’t taken Typing 101 yet.
Fortunately, it’s possible to create a successful registration process for these folks with an understanding of how their brains work. We’ll explore how to design effective registration forms for kids based on their context, technical skills, and cognitive capabilities.
Successful registration forms for kids:
have tangible value propositions instead of abstract activities,
provide opportunities for creativity,
use pictures whenever possible,
require little personal data, and
use “friendly” language.
Tangible value propositions vs. abstract activities
Since kids in this age group find it hard to understand and visualize abstract ideas, it’s important to communicate tangible benefits at the outset of the registration process. During a recent user research session, a seven-year-old boy looking at a popular kids’ site said, “Why do I have to sign-up? Just to play games? I can play games on other websites without signing in, so I don’t see why I have to sign-up here.” To this boy, the concept of “playing games” was too abstract. If he could read about (or better yet) see the types of games available on the site, as well as other activities, such as saving his high scores, he would be more likely to register.
The Barbie Girls site does a nice job with its registration process. Before entering any information, kids take a virtual “tour” of the site, where they can see and experience activities and assets available to them if they sign-up:
Fig 1. Registration on the Barbie Girls site
At the beginning of the registration process, kids get to see the outfits they can dress their avatars in as well as how they can customize the site. This clearly communicates one of the main value propositions of the site: Creating and customizing an online presence. It’s more powerful and easier to grasp than simply telling kids they can “make a Barbie Girl.”
LEGO takes a similar approach with its LEGO ID registration process. An animated LEGO man explains sign-up benefits to kids. Pairing text with voice to accompany a well-known character helps reinforce the site’s value proposition as well.
Opportunities for creativity
When designing a registration flow for adults, the key is to make it quick and easy, allowing fast access to content and information. For kids, the journey is the destination. It’s important to make that journey as fun, engaging, and rewarding as possible. Provide plenty of opportunities for creativity, from crafting user IDs to picking avatars to selecting security questions. Creating a multi-step registration process is a good way to unfold this. It allows kids to become comfortable with the process and can help with later recall, to reinforce ongoing login behavior.
Distilling the registration flow on a kids’ site into multiple screens simplifies the process—as counter-intuitive as it may sound. If each screen in the flow contains one step in the process, it provides an ongoing sense of accomplishment, especially if you provide visual ”rewards” as kids move through the activities. This is quite a departure from designing flows for adults, where each extraneous click is seen as more work and another barrier to accessing desired content.
A great approach to this is to invite kids to share a little bit more about themselves in a creative way during each step in the process. PBS KIDS GO! does a really nice job here. In the first registration step, kids “make up” their own username. Not an e-mail address, not a parent’s name, but a name of their choosing, allowing them to craft their own identity for the site:
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