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Overview

This project presents the design of a toy camera with tangible user interface called KidzEye. The main components of KidzEye includes both physical and digital interfaces. The physical interface is consisted of squishy material for children to grasp and squish to trigger the sensor for digital interaction. The digital interface design features are derived from observing the abilities, limitations and needs of pre-k children playing with some related products. The digital interface emphasizes the importance of visualization, feedback and guidance for children. Design principles were developed from several surveys and observation of use with the working prototypes.

Why a Toy Camera

From prior research, pre-K children have limitations on communication. I also found that children really like to take photos. They are curious about the image took from a camera. This inspired me to think about if children could have a camera designed for their age specifically, this could help parents better understand their children by image recognition technologies and data analysis. The distance between parents and child could be shorten.

Research & Design Process

Sketch Ideation

Final Protoype

User Testing & Insights

Seven pre-K children had enrolled in the user tesing. I found the following insights:

For the physical interface, children loved soft and squishy material instead of rigid toy camera. They prefered brighter color such as yellow, instead of light blue. The organic squishy material could fits to all different hand size. The curve shape at the bottom of the camera could rest on their belly naturally.

For the digital interface, most pre-K children could perform simple finger motor skills on a touch screen, although some of them had a longer learning curve. It was hard for pre-K children to complete a task by more than two steps because children could have a hard time understanding the concept of layers and menu.