Evaluating the use of visual prompts in online meeting applications for kindergarteners

Abstract

The use of online meeting applications for educational purpose, has increased during pandemic. These meeting applications mostly use textual prompts as a way of communicating with the user, which might not be suitable for kindergarteners. To enhance the usability of meeting applications, Visual Prompts and visual cues are suggested to apply in this research for attaining better user experience, and the efficacy and efficiency is proved by the experiments and results of this study. A task-based user experiment was designed for kindergarten children, aged from three to seven, where they were asked to complete certain tasks based on three different Visual Prompt designs in the online meeting application interface. The Visual Prompts were designed using Unity software for Zoom application platform. The results were analyzed for task success rate and task completion time using SPSS statistical analysis software. The results showed high t-values of success rate (t = 5.093) and task completion time (t = 10.093), which indicates that the technical scaffolding, in the form of Visual Prompts, is more helpful to communicate the information for a given task. Moreover, it was concluded that the use of Visual Prompts enhanced the learnability of an online meeting application for young children, whereas the textual prompts lagged in performance due to underdeveloped language skills of the same age group. Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.