Icon Design Principles for Preschoolers: Implications Derived from Child Development

To better design GUI for preschool users, this study suggests three icon design principles: the principle of obvious visibility, the principle of visual resemblance, and the principle of conceptual resemblance. The conceptual reasoning behind the proposed principles is borrowed from research areas of semiotics, picture-reading and neurodevelopment of children. These principles had also been applied to icon designs for the self-made story-authoring software, MyStory. With this application, the readability of the designed icons is investigated. Icon designs violating any proposed principles result in low readability. Five reasons for lower readability are proposed: unrealistic decorative designs, distorted written styles, experience void, overgeneralized association, and infrequently visible.