Framework for Evaluating the Usability of Mobile Educational Applications for Children Rabail Tahir and Fahim Arif Department of Computer Software Engineering, Military College of Signals (MCS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan rabailtahir.mscs19@students.mcs.edu.pk, fahim@mcs.edu.pk ABSTRACT Mobile technology is becoming an integral learning tool for children. The Interface of mobile educational applications (apps) should be usable and compatible with the cognitive skills of children in order to provide an effective learning experience. Usability is a key quality attributes to measure the usefulness of application; therefore evaluating usability is a vital task. With the rapid advancement of mobile technology, usability of educational apps for children gains attention of modern researchers. This paper focuses on providing a framework for evaluating the interface of mobile educational apps designed for children .The paper attempts to review the existing interface design guidelines and consequently develop a framework. The framework serves as basis for comprehensive usability evaluation consisting of guidelines, usability characteristics, goals (interface design criteria), questions, usability metrics (objective and subjective) and two evaluation instruments (task list and satisfaction questionnaire).To ensure the effectiveness and reliability of the framework ,it was validated by applying the proposed metrics and evaluation instruments in a usability study conducted on two android educational apps for children. Results gathered from usability testing proved that the framework is applicable for evaluation of mobile educational apps for children. KEYWORDS Usability evaluation; Interface design; Mobile educational applications; Goal Question metric (GQM); Guidelines 1. INTRODUCTION Mobile technologies can provide a key support in education and help children develop new important skills. Results indicate that children are always excited to use mobile devices [1].A number of design challenges are involved in developing educational apps for children. The interface should be child friendly and also compatible with cognitive skills of children [1]. The term “mobile learning” is increasingly gaining attention of modern researchers with a new trend focusing on k-12 education. Trend suggest that preschoolers and elementary school age kids (k-5) would be using the mobile devices flawlessly first at their homes and then in the classrooms of 2015 as a normal part of growing up in this digital age. The results indicate that by the end of 2015, around 80% of word population will have access to mobile devices[2].The well designed educational apps are very effective for children learning. Current research shows that in mobile learning, interface design and attention to usability will lead to better mobile learning [3]. Therefore mobile educational applications (such as apps for math skills, vocabulary, memory games, drawing etc) are extremely useful for learning experiences of children and the user interface (UI) design of these applications is a key concern for their success and usefulness. Touch screen mobile technologies create new usability problems such as small screen, different interaction ISBN:978-0-9891305-8-5 ©2014 SDIWC 156