My kids use quite a few education software titles. It's great that they think they're playing when they're also learning. However, there's some really annoying software in this market. Here's some of my peeves.
- Rude installations that don't follow Windows conventions. For example, installing in a directory just below the C drive root. Worst of all, many don't give you a choice about where it gets installed.
- Copy protection that requires you to always have the CD. Kids handling CD's is a nightmare. They get scratched, dropped, dirty and lost.
- Support for Windows XP. I have quite a few titles that only run on Windows 98. It also seems rare for the publishers to provide patch releases of education titles.
- Games that install QuickTime. I don't want to install QuickTime because then QuickTime wants to take over file type associations and download new versions. It complicates configuration. Use DirectX instead.
- Annoying, repetitive and continuous music. Allow the music to be easily muted or get more creative with the music and how it's used.
- Games that are hard to quit out of or are slow to exit. A typical scenario is that I'm in a hurry to leave for somewhere and the kids are playing on the computer. It's really annoying to be forced to watch credits.
However my biggest peeve is just how bad some of the user interfaces are. Kids are difficult users and a huge effort should be made to get the user interface easy to use.
- Drag and drop is not easy for many kids to perform. Don't use it.
- Navigation that relies on real world metaphors are often not intuitive enough. Typically you have to discover what objects are active and mistakes are easily made when the target provides no feedback.
- Animations that you can't escape or by pass. Once you've seen it once or twice, you want to get past it quickly. This is particularly important if you've got to it by a mistake.
- Make it easy to recover from mistakes and ignore rampant mouse clicking.
- Don't assume the user can read! My five year old can play games beyond his years but not if critical information is only provided in text.
- Adaptive difficulty and support. Education software must be clever about monitoring a user and adjusting the game difficulty and providing hints to solve a problem. Navigation should become more prescriptive over time if there's a particularly place the user needs to get to.
It would be really fantastic if there were some broad conventions and guidelines that all education software adopted so that it would be easier for children to move between software titles. Everyone would benifit and there would be fewer frustrated children that parents would have to calm down.