Expert review of an interactive learning tool

As part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we conducted a free expert usability review of the Early Shakespeare online trial created by SEN Assist.

The challenge

SEN Assist is a small company creating resources aimed at including children with Autism and other special educational needs in literacy. Early Shakespeare is part of a range of storytelling products offered that provide an inclusive approach to literacy in primary schools. It is an interactive learning tool created by education experts. Shakespeare’s stories are broken down into bite sized portions, which children can easily follow, understand and remember.

We identified usability issues and provided recommendations for improving the Early Shakespeare product to ensure that children with different abilities can benefit from it.

What we did

• Our expert usability review was performed from the perspective of children and teachers using the trial. We focused on specific tasks these users would carry out, including reading a story and undertaking various activities to test their knowledge of the characters, sequence of events and general comprehension of the story.
• Our review was based on a number of categories that demonstrate principles of good usability and accessibility, taken from International Usability Standards including ISO 9241-110 Human-centred design for interactive systems.

Benefits

• Our expert usability review provided a quick and cost-effective way to identify any major usability issues with the Early Shakespeare online trial.
• Using our findings from the expert usability review, we made practical recommendations, with illustrations, on how SEN Assist could achieve this.
• We prioritised our recommendations for improvement to help the development team plan their work effectively.