Evan Blackwell Unit 4 assignment. Critique of PBS Kids website

Transcription

1 Evan Blackwell Unit 4 assignment Critique of PBS Kids website The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) offers a wide variety of popular kids television programs, from Sesame Street to Curious George to The Cat in the Hat and many more. PBS showcases those programs on the PBS Kids interactive website located at pbskids.org. The PBS Kids website uses video, audio, animated characters, games and other forms of interactive content on a bright, colorful palette, designed to be appealing to young children. This critique will evaluate several of these components and analyze how effective they are. Home page It s very clear immediately that the PBS Kids website is targeted to a young audience, due to the bright color scheme, large buttons and very recognizable cartoon characters, which are all visible right on the home page. You can see all of these elements in the image below: In Writing for Multimedia and the Web Timothy Garrand describes the single-level linking organizational structure as similar to wandering into a chaotic flea market. The user can go any number of places and talk to anyone in any order.

2 On the home page, the PBS Kids site takes this approach. While there is some standard top level navigation in the upper right corner of the screen, most of the site s primary features are found in large buttons floating in the middle of the page, marked Videos and Games. The home page also introduces the user to some creative interactive navigation, such as a rotating wheel (see image below) of all the PBS children s programs. Stopping the wheel on a particular image and clicking leads the user to a page specific to that program. Users who continue to scroll down the home page see a panel of attractively designed game buttons, broken down by New, Popular and Hard easy-tounderstand categories that will make sense to the target audience. There is also a link for an interactive play section hosted by Hooper, the PBS Kids guinea pig mascot who appears on TV between PBS kids programming. He s a familiar face to young viewers of PBS shows, which makes him the perfect character to serve as an interactive host.

3 Videos Videos are one of the primary interactive components of the PBS Kids site, and they are accessed by clicking the Videos button on the home page. When users visit the Videos section, a default video immediately begins playing. During my critique of the site, that video was a fun clip related to The Cat in the Hat s birthday, which was being celebrated that week. The video pages have a very simple and easy interface for playing videos, with a minimal amount of text a design that makes sense for the younger visitors. There is a scrollable bar on the right side of the page, which allows the user to click through and play a selection of videos. Each one is a snippet from a PBS Kids show. Games PBS Kids offers a range of game options, which address some of the key goals of interactive media. The games attempt to teach users, while also entertaining them at the same time. Users access the Games in a couple of ways. There is a Games button, visible high above the fold on the home page, which users can click to be taken to a page that offers a menu page of game options. Users can also scroll down and access several of the games right from the home page, as a selection of them are highlighted there.

4 If a user chooses to click the Games button and enter the Games page, they find the Games broken down into several categories, including New, Popular, Vocabulary, Engineering and Adventure. Underneath each topic, there are links telling the viewer there are more games to be found. For example under Vocabulary, in addition to the six games displayed, there is a link to 59 More Vocabulary Games. The content is vast. It s easy to imagine a child exploring this Games section for hours. Unfortunately, the content within the Games section is so vast and covers so many different PBS shows, the linking navigation becomes confusing the deeper you explore. I clicked on the Vocabulary game Bert Pigeon Trouble which had the Sesame Street character Bert asking the user to help clean up his apartment by identifying certain words. Once the game was finished, I expected to be taken to a menu with other Vocabulary games. Instead I was taken to a page just for Sesame Street games. I eventually had to click the PBS Kids logo and go all the way back to the home page to start over from where I was.

5 The same experience happened within the Adventure game Blast Off with Curious George. After playing the game, which involved counting down with numbers and helping George launch a rocket, the user was then within a page for the Curious George show, not other Adventure games. For me, this experience was confusing. Exercise with Hooper As discussed throughout our class, characters can be a very useful device for guiding users through interactions. Garrand specifically refers to children s programs when discussing the use of characters as an interactive device. PBS Kids makes wonderful use of a character with their extremely interactive section for Hooper. The character Hooper is an animated guinea pig, who appears on TV in short vignettes between PBS kids shows. Upon clicking the button on the home page to enter Hooper s section, users see Hooper and are greeted with simple narration, Hi, I m Hooper! What do you want to do today? There are two sets of navigation on Hooper s page, a long rectangular bar and a circle with a rotating arrow. Each one contains the faces of various PBS cartoon characters. When the user hovers the cursor over a character, Hooper audibly calls out the character s name and/or game that follows by clicking. One of the choices is Exercise with Coach Hooper. After the user clicks that choice, they are taken to a new screen, where the simple, easy-to-understand voiceover script can be heard again as Hooper tells the user, Hi, I m Coach Hooper! Get ready to exercise with me and my friends! The game offers the user a variety of options to customize their exercise game: using a webcam, picking a PBS cartoon character to exercise with and who they want to exercise like (for example, a surfer or an astronaut).

6 Then the exercises begin. If the user chose surfer then they are told to walk like you are walking down the beach and then pretend they are surfing like they are riding the waves. Hooper appears in the corner of the screen and provides instructions and encourages the user through the whole program with exclamations like Keep it up! and You re doing a great job! Conclusion The PBS Kids website knows its target audience well. They understand young viewers will be attracted to the bright, flashy, colorful design. Their library of game and video content is impressive, and it achieves the goals of both educating and entertaining their visitors. However, for all those strengths, I believe there could be improvements made with the organization and navigation. I would be interested in seeing what type of flow chart and site map the designers created when building the site. If the games are lumped in categories together, why doesn t the navigation work that way? But for the content alone, I would still recommend that parents have their young children visit this site.