I am building a game for children.
The game contains questions.
Age range: 5-18.
Context: learning.
Before the questions I have a screen where the children select a difficulty level:
I want to replace the text "Level.." with somthing else which is not textual language.
I thought about colors or symbols. What is the best user experience for kids?
You could use several cues to reinforce each other: Background getting slightly darker at more difficulty. Use a star - which is a positive symbol, whatever the difficulty. Use more of the stars for more difficult levels Use colours for the stars.
For example:
I would recommend going with a combination of pictures and colors to convey information as studies have shown that children relate to bright and vivid colors better as mentioned in this article
Ever notice that toys, books and children's web sites usually contain large blocks of bright, primary colors? Young children prefer these colors and respond more positively than they do to to pastels or muted blends.
Here are some recommendations of how you could potentially show the different difficulty options to children based upon the use of visual images and color options
This option uses different colors to communicate difficulty levels
This approach uses visual images to communicate increasing difficulty levels
Here is another example which uses a combination of visual images and relative image sizing to convey difficulty levels.
Another option is to use visual metaphors of increasing levels of progression to show the difficulty levels
This may be a bit wacky but I would use a child pushing a rock up a hill image / cartoon.
Something like this:
I'd keep making the rock bigger for the harder versions. I felt that's one image which is clear and universally accessible.
Alternatively, something like the image below:
There are some comics stereotypes that are related to the knowledge - you can use them - for example - little girl in pink dress with flowers (easy), then girl with schoolbag - medium and girl with glasses, pile of books and pencil behind the ear - hard. The same icons can be created with boy faces - depending on the player gender, or with two kids on the icon - girl and boy.
Remember when writing user-interfaces for children that you'll be dealing with a large amount of varied backgrounds and abilities.
A cartoon picture of a kid riding a bike. On level ground for the easiest level, and then 2 or 3 increasing grades to indicate more difficult levels.
Alternatively, 3 or 4 different bicycles. Tricycle for easiest, then a training wheel bicycle, older child's bicycle, then racing or mountain bike.
I think a good idea is to propose also a concept:
"The harder you play, the better you become"
Let me explain with a class dress progression from a famous title:
So children know the concept "level" and know the concept "improve while playing".
Obviously, the image I proposed is not suitable for a game for children but I hope you got the idea.
How about barbells? It seems like a pretty universal concept that just about anyone can understand. A small barbell is easier to lift than a big heavy barbell. You could even show someone lifting the barbells. You could show progression from a skinny kid strugling to lift a tiny barbell up to a superhero lifting an olympic deadlift with one hand.
This is not an actual answer to the question you asked, but did you consider not having levels at all, or at least not levels that the user chooses? Why not just start with medium level questions, and then automatically progress to harder ones if the kid answers them easily, and easier ones if he/she doesn't. You can modify the rate of progression so that the faster that they answer, the faster it progresses to higher difficulty (and visa versa).
Of course, getting this right will involve a lot of testing, to make sure that you don't get too hard too fast, but also that you don't bore the kid with too many easy questions. There are probably some good mathematical models and studies around for how to do this well.
The answers here are still relevant though if you want to let the player manually change his/her level while playing. You could have a little bar on the side representing the difficulty level, which can be adjusted, or some kind of "too easy?" or "too hard?" buttons which would bump the difficulty up or down a level.
I think images of children of different ages could be useful. Images of younger kids indicate easier levels, older kids indicate harder levels.
The effectiveness of this of course would depend on the age range of the kids the game targets though. For example, the difference in age might not be as apparent between ages 5 and 6 as it would between 5 or 7.
Younger kids tend to look up to older kids also, so the desire of getting to the 'big kid' level could help with motivation to play the game.
For a kids game they should be able to count (even if they don't know the numbers they understand that 3 is more than 2) show showing a certain number of objects based on the difficulty is probably best. The objects you use should be based on the game you are creating. If all the games you create are going to be completely different then each game should have it's own images for the levels. If you games are going to be tied together with a common theme than you can use the same images for all you games.
I suggest the following graphics for levels:
The images could be of the common game style. Sorry, I'm not artist to quickly produce icons :-)
You have a really fundamental flaw here, which is trying to design a game for age 5-18. It cannot be done, the design considerations for a 5 year old and an 18 year old have almost nothing in common, you need a far more focussed age range. Like 5-8.
So before thinking about how to indicate difficultly, I'd really urge you to split your demographic and make separate games, or even just scrap two thirds of the age group that you are trying to hit.
Next, if a child perceives something as being slightly too young for them, they will regard it as babyish and will not be interested at all. So whatever you do, do not use the above suggestion of big blocks of bright primary colours. Give that to a 14 year old and you'll be laughed out of the building.
The general rule when designing for children is to age up the visuals and age down the interaction. So when thinking about the information you're trying to communicate, make it as simple and literal as possible, but then when creating the artwork, keep a much higher age-group in mind.
So for indication of difficulty, bearing in mind the above - if you are dealing with young children, you cannot rely on them reading anything, and you cannot rely on them understanding ANY metaphors. You must be as simple and as literal as possible. Forget about trying to find a metaphor to represent difficulty, and go directly to the source - create something that is a direct representation of what they will experience when they hit that button.
If a higher difficultly means enemies moving more quickly, show enemies moving more quickly on the button (eg. motion blur). If it means only 3 lives instead of 5, show three lives on the button.
If you are designing for children there are two excellent resources, the recommendations in both of them perfectly match everything that I've ever seen when testing with kids -
http://www.sesameworkshop.org/assets/1191/src/Best%20Practices%20Document%2011-26-12.pdf (may be too young for your audience)
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/children-on-the-web/ (costs money but highly worth it, there's a very short free summary here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/childrens-websites-usability-issues/ and also a version covering teenagers here: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-of-websites-for-teenagers/
I would argue that something like a coloured gauge with the labels easy (in the green zone) and hard (in the red zone) would be a very clear sign.
I mean something like this:
The best way of providing feedback such as this is through TEXT and therefore the image can be whatever you would like.
To use an image means that you must provide something that is universally accepted as a method of determining difficulty and understandable to children, this is a very hard thing to source.
Images are also completely open to interpretation by the individual. For example, where a frown may mean difficulty to one person, it may mean anger to another.
Text allows you to easily explain the difference in levels so it is universally accepted. The image can then relate to the design of your game so it fits with the rest of the user experience and interface.
You should use text such as EASY, MEDIUM, HARD, ADVANCED so that it ties in with a learning based program or if they are actually Levels that you need to complete in order, you should use LEVELS.
Since the game is questions, I'm assuming that means the kids can read. So why not just use some basic icon (like Roger Attrill's), but complement it with text, which briefly describes the categories of the contents of the questions. I would think that even a child knows what he knows, and what he doesn't know.
For example, if they are arithmetic questions, something like
You complained on my other answer that the children might end up with questions they couldn't answer. That is actually possible even if they choose the level themselves, unless you tell them what the levels are.
One very understandable metaphor for children is age. Children of very young age are already familiar with the idea of grades in school, and that the bigger kids do harder work. Therefore a very simple way to represent difficulty is to represent the age of a child visually, for example by size.
For example it might go from toddler or baby up to an adolescent. Granted, depicting these differences obviously enough while still keeping the total age range at roughly your target audience would be difficult, and may require a bit of exaggeration on either end. And of course there could be negative connotations to making the easy level look too "babyish".
