Designing Multimedia Applications for Children Janet C Read

Abstract This paper describes a methodology for designing multimedia applications for children. It begins with a summary of the published research in this area and then goes on to describe a methodology that can be used to ensure that products that are being designed for children will be ‘fit for purpose’. Two novel features of the methodology are the involvement of children in the design process and the identification of a set of heuristics that can be used to guide the design process.

1 Introduction Children are an interesting user group and they represent a huge and growing market for interactive products. It is essential, when designing to understand their characteristics and needs; the mantra ‘Know your users’ is often repeated in the HCI literature. It is common to divide interactive products for children into the two broad categories of education and entertainment with the term ‘edutainement’ being used for those products that mix the two genres (Bruckman et al., 2003). A third genre that is often omitted from classifications is ‘enabling’ products; this classification would include dedicated word processors, web browsers for children and communication products. Products are developed for children in much the same way that they are developed for adults. It is common to use some sort of lifecycle approach such as the one shown below.

Figure 1 - The System Lifecycle

Special approaches are needed throughout the lifecycle when the intended users are children. If children are being interviewed for requirements gathering, their emotional and social maturity become important. Products that are intended for children need to take into consideration their language abilities, their understanding of metaphors and analogies and they way in which they are likely to navigate through a system. This paper begins with a summary of the research into designing for children with the emphasis being on the earlier rather than the later stages of the system lifecycle.

2 Background Research 2.1 Developing Interactive Products for Children There is a growing body of research on developing interactive products for children. Some of this research reports very general findings whereas some is much more specific. General guidelines tend to focus on good practice and many of these emanate from Allison Druins research team at Maryland. (Druin et al., 1999) pioneered new research methods that include children at all stages of the development process. One influential approach is called co-operative enquiry, in this methodology children and adults work together as design partners with all team members, young and old, being valued for their ideas and contributions (Alborzi et al., 2000). Problems with this sort of inter-generational design approach include the inequality between the adults and children in terms of their skills and knowledge and also, the fact that children see that adults as leaders. (Druin et al., 1999) have derived some general requirements for products that are being intended for children. They note that children notice ‘what’s cool, how easy things are to learn, what things look like’ and ‘how much multimedia there is in a product’. (Druin, 1999) concludes that children aged 5 – 7 want interfaces that they can easily control; they want interfaces that ‘respect’ them, those being interfaces that are not too simple. Researchers at Microsoft have suggested that any computer based activity should be ‘inherently interesting, have expanding complexity and should include reward structures’; that the instructions should be ‘age appropriate, easy to understand and remember, supportive rather than distracting and should allow the children to control the amount of information that they get’ (Hanna et al., 1997).

2.2 Designing Software for Children There are features of children that are different from adults and it is these features that have to be taken into account when designing software for them. Their physical size, their developing motor control and the sophistication of their hand to eye coordination have an impact on their ability to use pointing devices. (Joiner et al., 1998) and (Inkpen, 2001) both report that it is difficult for children do drag and drop activities; (Strommen, 1994) and (Hourcade, 2003) have identified that the ability to point at targets and the ability to hold down mice buttons improve with age. The standard of a child’s reading and language understanding will impact on interface design. Words need to be chosen that are meaningful to the children and speech output can be useful for help and extra assistance. A study by (Bernard et al., 2001) reports that children who can read prefer larger font sizes and work by (Hanna et al., 1999) suggests that the difficulties that children have with reading can be reduced by the use of ‘visually meaningful icons’, ‘thoughtful cursor design’, and the addition of features such as rollover, audio, animation, and highlighting. There is some specific research on the selection of icons for children’s interfaces. (Uden et al., 2000) and (Baecker et al., 1991) report that children prefer animated icons, and it is often the case that such icons can offer more information than those with static representations. General interface design rules, such as these by (Shneiderman, 1998) can also be applied to products for children. ♦ Strive for consistency ♦ Enable frequent users to use shortcuts ♦ Offer informative feedback ♦ Design dialogues to yield closure

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♦ Offer error prevention and simple error handling ♦ Permit easy reversal of actions ♦ Support internal locus of control ♦ Reduce short term memory load Children interact with software in different ways; they are easily distracted, they have different motivations than adults and they often work or play on the computer with a friend. They are also likely to ‘try out’ the software; (Halgren et al., 1995) reported that children would click on things to see what they did and (Hanna et al., 1997) noted that children would often repeat distracting activities just for amusement!

2.3 Evaluating Interfaces for and with Children The methods used to evaluate a product are determined by the stage of development of the product at the point of evaluation, the availability of resources (including users and design experts) and the feature(s) of the product that are being evaluated. Some of the methods that can be used to evaluate interactive products are listed here; ♦ Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen, 1994) ♦ Structured walkthrough ♦ Cognitive Walkthoughs (Polson et al., 1992) ♦ Think aloud (Erikson, 1950) ♦ Co-Discovery (Boren et al., 2000) ♦ Peer- Tutoring (Höysniemi et al., 2003) ♦ Fun Toolkit (Read et al., 2002) In observational work with children, the age, the position, and the appearance of the observer may influence the findings (Hanna et al., 1997). Guidelines by (Druin, 1999) recommend that observers use their first names, get onto the same level as the children and that they dress informally. When observing children, decisions have to be made about the use of recording equipment, whether or not video or tape recording is used and if so, where the recording device is to be positioned. If the intention is to evaluate engagement, behavioural signs can be more reliable than children’s responses and so video can be useful (Hanna et al., 1997); the downside of video recording is that it can interfere with the children’s behaviour, causing them to either freeze or perform to the camera (Druin, 1999). Some general characteristics of children that need to be taken into account when carrying out evaluations are that they have developing capacity to verbalise, they have different levels of extroversion, their knowledge and skills may be different, and although generally being very honest in their judgements, the reliability of reported data is questionable, (Druin, 1999), (Hanna et al., 1999), (Markopoulos et al., 2003). Children are generally observed using products at home or in the classroom, but it is also possible to carry out evaluations in specially constructed usability labs. (Rode et al., 2003) discuss the constraints of evaluating interactive products in the school classroom. A common technique for adults is think-aloud, when the user talks about the interaction. The extra mental workload required for verbalising and the uncomfortable social situation of having a quiet observer telling you to ‘keep talking’ make it a hard method to apply, particularly for children users. Work by (Donker et al., 2001) has shown that older children aged 9 - 12 are able to provide a running commentary during interaction and that think aloud helps identify more usability problems than a post-task interview or a post-task questionnaire. Co-discovery is a similar method of eliciting children’s views but this assumes two children are looking

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at the product and can therefore talk more naturally about it. (van Kesteren et al., 2003) studied several variations of co-discovery with children aged six and seven and their study suggested that ‘Active Intervention’ (where the evaluator prompts the children for explanations of what they are doing and to give a commentary on their interaction) seemed the most promising approach. Children can be asked in an informal way about products that they have seen; either alone, or with a group of their peers. They can also be asked in a more formal way using methods that rely on a question – answer approach; these methods include interviews or questionnaires. For formal surveys with young children (aged 4 – 7), interviews work better than questionnaires, particularly in the lower ages. Interviewing young children needs special care, as they are known to sometimes be unwilling to assert themselves or to contradict the adult (Breakwell, 2000). Young children are very literal, so questions like ‘have you used a computer like this before’ will be inappropriate as they may interpret it to mean a computer of the same colour, shape, make and size as the one being used. This age of child is more likely to use ‘satisfying’ responses and approaches when they are not very interested in the activity (Vaillancourt, 1973). Older children, aged 8 – 11 are easier to survey and can complete simple questionnaires; however, they also tend to be very literal and cannot easily understand negatively constructed questions. Whereas practice with adults favours interspersing positive and negative statements when determining attitudes, this is not advisable with children. Children with more developed language skills produce better data and research has indicated that low reading ability correlates with the number of unanswered questions; other reasons for questions being unanswered include short concentration spans or boredom. Interestingly, boys are more likely to leave questions unanswered than girls, and the proportion of unanswered questions decreases with age. The language that is used in the survey, whether written or verbal, needs to be the language used by the children. Practical ways of ensuring that this is the case include carrying out a pilot survey, asking a class teacher, or researching age related language development. For a survey to have validity, it needs to have meaning for the least articulate members of the group. For further detail on the evaluation of products with children, the interested reader is encouraged to read (MacFarlane et al., 2004)

3 Multimedia Design There are many different methodologies for multimedia product design (Barfield, 2004), (Dastbaz, 2002) but common to all are a set of key steps, generally identified to be; ♦ Identifying the requirements of the system ♦ Identifying the design issues ♦ Implementation ♦ Testing and Evaluation (Dastbaz, 2002) These steps can be done incrementally (as in the Waterfall method (Dix et al., 1998)) or iteratively (as in prototyping methods such as Boehm’s spiral method (Boehm, 1988)). The approach taken here is a hybrid methodology that approaches the first two steps of design from four angles; requirements for the novel application, a look at the currently available products, a historical analysis of the domain area and an investigation of the current research into the design of such systems. This approach, advocated by (Keinonen, 2002) embodies both horizontal and vertical thinking and

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supports the sometimes-conflicting notions of re-usability, task conformance and innovation.

3.1 The Dream Catcher Approach 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Determine the Product Concept Look behind and find out what has gone before Look along and see what is available, both to build from and to build onto Walk with the users and elicit their requirements Walk alone and design top down or bottom up At all times link the strands together

Figure 2 - The Dream Catcher Methodology

3.2 Identifying the Relationship of the Child to the Product As pointed out by (Kafai et al., 1997), knowledge about the limitations and capabilities of the software that is being developed, as well as knowledge about the processes that the software is intended to support is needed for children to contribute effectively to design. To examine the effectiveness of the children’s contribution, three different relationships between children and interactive products have been identified: ♦ Children as Players - In this relationship, the child sees the interactive product as a plaything; to satisfy its’ purpose it must amuse or entertain the child. ♦ Children as Users - Here, the child sees the interactive product as a tool; for the product to be useful it must enable the child and make things easier to do. ♦ Children as Learners - The interactive product is seen as a substitute school or a teacher; it is expected to instruct and challenge, reward and amuse. When children are asked to identify what they need or require from a product, they are constrained by their lack of knowledge of areas such as learning and usability.

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Figure 3 - The PUL model

They do not know how it is that products enable them or instruct them. They do not know how it is that products challenge them or make things easier. However, children are able to inform developers about those things that amuse and entertain them; this knowledge can result in the children being able to communicate requirements for fun. Additionally, they know something about making things easier. They have a notion of consistency and visibility and they can relate to ideas like task conformance (like a book).

3.3 Appropriate Heuristics There are therefore, three aspects that need to be designed into products, depending on their intended use. Usability – this can be assessed by general usability heuristics Learner-ability – this needs to be assessed by the use of heuristics for learning interfaces Fun – this needs to be assessed using fun heuristics

4 Conclusion This discussion paper has described a novel approach to designing for children. The dream catcher approach is based on an understanding of the world within which the child lives, and gives some clues for the designer about where to look for ideas and information. The PUL model can be used to describe what it is that children want from a product, and therefore determine which heuristics are most appropriate thus informing us about how well a product matches the child’s expectations. Further work will develop the dream catcher model to possibly include adult stakeholders and will investigate its’ relationship to the PUL model.

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