Eileen Ruberto DMS 546 Designing Interfaces for Children

Overview Focus on elementary-age children (ages 6-11) Information seeking behavior How children search for and retrieve information in a web-based environment

Information Seeking "Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Information seeking... is a... human-oriented and open-ended process. In information seeking, you do not know whether there exists an answer to your query. The very process of seeking may provide the learning required to satisfy the information need the user may have." Source: Wikipedia.org

Why Design for Children? Children do not think in the same ways as adults Young children process information more slowly than adults For motor skills that involve a mouse, early elementary-age children are slower to acquire a target than adults and require larger targets. Early elementary-age children also have difficulty holding down a mouse button for extended periods of time, coordinating dragging and clicking, double- clicking, and using multibutton mice.

Search Portals for Children Yahoo! Kids (  Formerly Yahooligans! Ask for Kids (  Formerly Ask Jeeves Kids “Children now are using the Web widely as an information source for both learning and leisure, yet overwhelmingly they are using not specialized portals designed for children but rather adults' search engines or portals such as Google and MSN.” --Andrew Large & Jamshid Beheshti

Common Mistakes Not taking into account the information processing and motor skills of children (difficulties manipulating small objects with a mouse) Not considering children’s searching and browsing skills (difficulties with spelling/typing/composing keyword queries; understanding and navigating category structures; understanding and creating Boolean queries) Presenting search criteria appropriate for adults, but not for children, who often like to search differently.

Children in the Design Process Intergenerational design teams: "Children are capable of being design partners and can be considered as equal stakeholders in the design of new technologies." --Dania Bilal By using unobtrusive observations, interviews, and focus group studies, researchers can obtain data and feedback for effective design criteria

Visual Design "Designers... must strike a balance between a plain and unimaginative but functional design on the one hand, and a gratuitously colorful and animated design that makes it both narrowly age specific and potentially distracting from its primary purpose: information retrieval." --Andrew Large & Jamshid Beheshti

Visual Design Avoid cluttered screens  Daunting to children whose cognitive skills are not well developed Fun name Colorful backgrounds and foregrounds Large, clearly legible fonts Visual information and cues rather than textual information Well-laid-out screens Graphics and animation Recognizable characters No advertisements Personalization  Respond to individual preferences  Increase appeal to wider age groups

Search & Navigation Large, easily clickable icons rather than a keyword search box that required typing Spell-checking features when typing is required Built-in Boolean protocol to prevent children from having to construct Boolean queries mentally Search categories based on how children like to search  Example: When searching for animals, searching based on what they eat or where they live

Search & Navigation Multiple modes of access Browsing - no skill-based typing necessary Clearly visible results to show search progress Display of retrieved information with informative summaries of the content Vocabulary  Controlled vocabularies a problem - trouble generating alternative terms  Natural language  Terminology - should be suitable for the target age group

Metaphors Younger children, in particular, are successful using a metaphorical approach Metaphors must be age-specific  Ask Jeeves for Kids - Children were not familiar with the cultural reference Example: Browsing interface based on using a set of bookshelves as a metaphor for the Dewey subject hierarchy

Miscellaneous Children need a portal that provides both educational and entertainment topics - latter increases motivation in seeking information. Online help - should be context sensitive and searchable

International Children’s Digital Library Free collection of over 1000 children’s books from around the world Popular resource - used by people from more than 170 countries. Features informed by children's feelings and thoughts

Bibliography Alonzo, M. (2002). The effect of individual differences on web-based interface design: A children's information processing and dual coding approach (Doctoral dissertation, University of Mississippi, 2002). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 454(131). Bilal, D. (2005). Children's information seeking and the design of digital interfaces in the affective paradigm. Library Trends, 54(2), Hutchinson, H.B., Druin, A., & Bederson, B.B. (2007). Supporting elementary-age children's searching and browsing: Design and evaluation using the International Children's Digital Library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(11), Jacobson, F.F. (1995). From Dewey to Mosaic: Considerations in interface design for children. Internet Research, 5(2), Large, A. (2005). Interface design, web portals, and children. Library Trends, 54(2),