User-centered empathy design: a prototype of school-age children learning aids system

School-age children receive external stimuli to understand the world and acquire various life skills through various learning behaviors. The process of children’s learning requires appropriate teaching methods, including children’s physical and mental status, special needs, and behavior, in order to provide learning aids, as appropriate, to help children acquire language, body movements, social skills, and other media, effectively take the user as the starting point to fit the needs of users, and observe binding and participatory designs to become a new research direction. In view of the rapid development of science and technology, the main purpose of this study is to explore a learning aids system suitable for school-age children, including the attributes, results, and elements to help children learn smoothly. It is difficult to understand the behavior and psychology of school-age children from traditional research methods, thus, the best way is to understand them is through interactions. Empathic design, which is the current research direction of the Design and Research Center, focuses on how designers propose design solutions based on the feelings experience, creativity, and understanding of users. This study is carried out according to the empathic design model, where the main procedure is Participant Observation to describe the behavioral phenomenon of school-age children, and Laddering interviews are applied to obtain qualitative data, conduct implication matrix analysis, and create a Streamlined Hierarchical Value Map according to the design guidelines and other steps to help designers and school-age children use the learning aids system to obtain a consensus, including system hardware and software development reference. The main research contribution is to respond to the needs of children in all aspects of life, put forward excellent learning aids system design guidelines, and then, help the learning development of children.