Impact of Usability Heuristics on User Satisfaction Among Coding Apps for Children

The design of software influences its usability and user satisfaction. To ensure an effective user interface, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) identifies several heuristics to follow when developing applications. Conducting heuristic evaluations can help identify potential design flaws and usability issues. User reviews are commonly used for requirements elicitation, but can also be analyzed for mentions of heuristics and HCI concerns. In this study we analyzed 300 random user reviews, scraped from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, for three popular coding apps for children: CodeSpark, ScratchJr, and Tynker. These applications allow young people to create programs through block-based, drag-and-drop methods. A team of three researchers then codified the reviews based on Jakob Nielsen's 10 HCI heuristics. We found that users of novice coding applications most frequently discussed user control and freedom, flexibility and efficiency of use, error prevention, and consistency in online user reviews. These usability heuristics were mentioned as being present in highly-rated user reviews (4 or 5 stars) and absent in lowly-rated user reviews (1 or 2 stars). Consistency and error prevention were found to have a statistically significant impact on overall user satisfaction. Knowing the most critical usability heuristics for end users can effectively guide the design and development of coding applications for novices.