When Speech Therapy Meets Play: Real Lessons from User Testing with Children
By Katherine Gu
I’m a Chapel Hill-based intern from UNC Chapel Hill working with Sing and Speak 4 Kids. This past spring, I had the opportunity to design and conduct my own user research project, testing our music-based language game with young children recruited from the University Child Care Center.
To better understand how children engage with the game, I conducted outreach, created permission slips that included preliminary questions about each child’s age and speech background, and designed a small-group user testing session with three 4-year-olds. Because we needed to stay inside their usual classrooms, I had to find creative ways to keep them focused, despite the familiar distractions of teachers, classmates, and toys nearby. While professionals often aim to create distraction-free environments during therapy, the reality is that if you’re a teacher or a parent, that’s not always possible, so how you engage the child becomes just as important as the tool itself.
With one computer, I guided the group through the game, asking each child to take turns making choices and answering questions while I kept the energy playful. I used animated language, imitated silly sound effects, and pointed excitedly at different images and words to help them stay engaged. Most importantly, I wanted them to feel like we were playing together, not just completing a task.
In a group setting, I had to consider the individual personalities of the children – some were shy, others were more outgoing or easily distracted – so learning how to speak their “language” simultaneously became essential. I drew from my years of experience working with kids at summer camps and music lessons, but this was different; instead of just keeping them entertained, I was helping them practice speech in a way that felt natural and enjoyable.
In my next post, I’ll be reviewing my observation notes, the session videos, and the children’s reactions to analyse patterns in how they engaged with the game. I will focus on what captured their attention, what confused them, and how they responded to prompts. Generating user feedback from young children is a unique process; unlike adults, they don’t often fill out surveys or explain their experience directly. Their feedback comes through observed behavior such as laughing, repeating sounds, losing focus, or asking unexpected questions (and they ask a lot of them!). These questions pulled us off track at times, so I learned the importance of answering briefly but warmly, then gently guiding the attention back to the activity. By combining these real-time observations with what I know about speech development and engagement, I hope to help improve the game’s design so it better supports a wide range of young learners.
