Designing the ‘record’ button: Using children’s understanding of icons to inform the design of a musical interface

Abstract

While standard icons often exist for common tasks, it can
be difficult to design meaningful icons for non-standard
tasks. Following a desire to build a music application that
does not rely on text, this paper explores suitable iconic
representations for a ‘record music’ function on a mobile
device. A study was carried out with primary school
children (aged 8-10) to explore their current understanding
of icons and elicit their requirements. It was seen that they
were familiar with common icons, but that audio recording
remains a difficult concept to represent in iconic fashion.