Design of Early Childhood Education Mobile Social Applications Based on the KJ-Kano Model

ECEMS (Early Childhood Education Mobile Social) apps are widely used by teachers and parents due to their efficient social and information acquisition channels. With the increasing awareness of ECE (Early Childhood Education), user needs have diversified and personalized, making it challenging to extract critical user needs, resulting in unclear product information structures or missing functions. Therefore, this study proposes a method combining the KJ method and KANO model to obtain the essential user needs, guiding the prototype design and development of ECEMS apps. We converted the essential user needs from practical research into six product function modules and their corresponding sub-modules: login and registration, messages, community, health, attendance, and customization. User experience tests and satisfaction evaluations on the developed prototype verified the effectiveness of the KJ-KANO model in extracting critical user needs. The mobile social app developed under this model demonstrated good usability, enhancing the efficiency of home-school information interaction and communicating parenting information, improving user satisfaction. The model proposed in this study can promote the success rate of similar product development.