Alexis Hiniker

Touchscreen prompts for preschoolers: designing developmentally appropriate techniques for teaching young children to perform gestures

Though toddlers and preschoolers are regular touchscreen users, relatively little is known about how they learn to perform unfamiliar gestures. In this paper we assess the responses of 34 children, aged 2 to 5, to the most common in-app prompting techniques for eliciting specific gestures. By reviewing 100 touchscreen apps for preschoolers, we determined the types of prompts that children are likely to encounter. We then evaluated their relative effectiveness in teaching children to perform simple gestures. We found that children under 3 were only able to interpret instructions when they came from an adult model, but that children made rapid gains between age 3 and 3-and-a-half, at which point they were able to follow in-app audio instructions and on-screen demonstrations. The common technique of using visual state changes to prompt gestures was ineffective across this age range. Given that prior work in this space has primarily focused on childrens fine motor control, our findings point to a need for increased attention to the design of prompts that accommodate childrens cognitive development as well.

@BabySteps: design and evaluation of a system for using twitter for tracking children's developmental milestones

The tracking of developmental milestones in young children is an important public health goal for ensuring early detection and treatment for developmental delay. While numerous paper-based and web-based solutions are available for tracking milestones, many busy parents often forget to enter information on a regular basis. To help address this need, we have developed an interactive system called @BabySteps for allowing parents who use Twitter to track and respond to tweets about developmental milestones using a special hashtag syntax. Parent responses are parsed automatically and written into a central database that can be accessed via the web. We deployed @BabySteps with 14 parents over a 3-week period and found that parents were able to learn how to use the system to track their childrens progress, with some using it to communicate with other parents. The study helped to identify a number of ways to improve the approach, including simplifying the hashtag syntax, allowing for private responses via direct messaging, and improving the social component. We provide a discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for the design of interactive public health systems.

It wasn't really about the Pokémon: Parents' Perspectives on a Location-Based Mobile Game

Though prior work shows parents worry about screen media experiences displacing physical activity and time outdoors, this research does not account for location-based mobile games like Pokémon GO, which specifically facilitate outdoor activity. To fill this gap in the research, we surveyed and interviewed parents to understand (1) their values and perceptions of this type of gameplay and (2) how they co-play Pokémon GO with their children. Our findings provide empirical evidence that, in addition to appreciating the increased exercise and time outdoors, parents valued how play led to family bonding experiences. Furthermore, some traditional concerns about screen time persisted in this context, and new concerns about safety in real-world environments emerged. Parents mitigated these concerns with rules and gameplay choices, such as maintaining control of the mobile device, to ensure children were safe. This work contributes an empirical understanding of families as co-users of technology and offers a generative lens to study and design for joint media engagement among family members where gameplay differs from normative notions of screen time.

Co-Designing with Preschoolers Using Fictional Inquiry and Comicboarding

In this case study, we describe a design workshop with 7 children age 4-6 using existing co-design techniques known to elicit design insights in older individuals. We found that our 5- and 6-year-old participants successfully generated design ideas using these methods, while 4-year-olds were unable to use create solutions in a traditional format. How-ever, these younger children enthusiastically offered opportunities where, with methodological guidance, the research-er could have followed the childs lead and shifted the design question to one that was potentially more meaningful for the participant. We propose a future work to examine the effectiveness of giving these younger participants great-er authority in defining and scoping the problem space.

Hidden symbols

Linking a symbol to the object it represents is a skill that develops gradually over the first few years of life. However, prior work shows that frequent use of this capacity makes it unintuitive for adults to recognize it as a challenge for young children. We hypothesized that this disconnect would manifest in software interfaces designed for young children, such that applications would embed symbols that the target audience would fail to understand. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 34 preschoolers between the ages of 2 and 5 to assess their ability to work with user interface elements that require symbolic mappings. In particular, we assessed, (1) symbolic progress bars and (2) demonstrations of touch interactions by an on-screen cartoon hand. We found that these techniques are entirely inaccessible for children under 3 and that they require specific design choices to facilitate understanding in children between the ages of 3 and 5. Among a sample of 94 popular apps targeting children in this age range, we found that these symbolic techniques are incorporated into 44% of apps for preschoolers. We further found that embellishing symbolic elements with visual detail, a common practice in apps for preschoolers, increases childrens cognitive burden and is an additional barrier to performing the symbolic mappings necessary to use these interfaces. We present design alternatives that make these prevalent user interface elements accessible to this user group. Display Omitted

Panel: Voice Assistants, UX Design and Research

In this panel, we discuss the challenges that are faced by HCI practitioners and researchers as they study how voice assistants (VA) are used on a daily basis. Voice has become a widespread and commercially viable interaction mechanism with the introduction of VAs such as Amazons Alexa, Apples Siri, the Google Assistant, and Microsofts Cortana. Despite their prevalence, the design of VAs and their embeddedness with other personal technologies and daily routines have yet to be studied in detail. Making use of a roundtable, we will discuss these issues by providing a number of VA use scenarios that panel members will discuss. Some of the issues that researchers will discuss in this panel include: (1) obtaining VA data & privacy concerns around the processing and storage of user data; (2) the personalization of VAs and the user value derived from this interaction; and (3) the relevant UX work that reflects on the design of VAs?

Why doesn't it work?: voice-driven interfaces and young children's communication repair strategies

In this study, we examine the conversational repair strategies that preschoolers use to correct communication breakdowns with a voice-driven interface. We conducted a two-week deployment in the homes of 14 preschoolers of a tablet game that included a broken voice-driven mini-game. We collected 107 audio samples of these childrens (unsuccessful) attempts to communicate with the mini-game. We found that children tried a common set of repair strategies, including repeating themselves and experimenting with the tone and pronunciation of their words. Children were persistent, rarely giving up on the interaction, asking for help, or showing frustration. When parents participated in the interaction, they moved through four phases of engagement: first making suggestions, then intervening, then making statements of resignation, and finally pronouncing that the interaction could not be repaired. Designers should anticipate that in this context, children will borrow behaviors from person-to-person communication, such as pivoting strategies to probe the source of failed communication and structuring communication into turn-taking attempts.

Let's Play!: Digital and Analog Play between Preschoolers and Parents

Play is an enjoyable and developmentally useful part of early childhood, and parent-child play is a highly productive mechanism by which children learn to participate in the world. We conducted an observational lab study to examine how 15 parent-child pairs (children age 4-6) respond to and play with tablet apps as compared to analog toys. We found that parents and children were less likely to engage with each other or to respond to each others bids for attention during play sessions with tab-lets versus play sessions with toys. We also observed that specific design features of tablet devices and childrens apps-such as one-sided interfaces, game paradigms that demand continual attention, and lack of support for parallel interaction-are the primary mechanism shaping these differences. We provide guidance suggesting how childrens apps might be re-designed to preserve the ad-vantages of digital play experiences while also evolving to build in the advantages of traditional toys.

Evaluating an iPad Game to Address Overselectivity in Preliterate AAC Users with Minimal Verbal Behavior

Overselectivity is a learning challenge that is largely unaddressed in the assistive technology community. Screening and intervention, done by specialists, is time-intensive and requires substantial training. Little to no treatments are available to the broader population of preliterate, minimally verbal individuals. In this work, we examine the impact of an iPad game based on the tenets of behavioral therapy to mitigate overselectivity. We developed software-based techniques and evaluated the system using established methods from the field of Special Education. We present the results of a deployment in a special education school that demonstrates that an assistive tablet game is a feasible means of addressing overselectivity, and we present generalizable technological features drawn from evidenced-based therapies to consider in future assistive technologies. We suggest that designers of assistive technology systems, particularly those who address physical, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties for preliterate AAC users, should consider overselectivity as a potential co-occurring condition.

Toward the operationalization of visual metaphor

Many successful digital interfaces employ visual metaphors to convey features or data properties to users, but the characteristics that make a visual metaphor effective are not well understood. We used a theoretical conception of metaphor from cognitive linguistics to design an interactive system for viewing the citation network of the corpora of literature in the JSTOR database, a highly connected compound graph of 2 million papers linked by 8 million citations. We created 4 variants of this system, manipulating 2 distinct properties of metaphor. We conducted a between‐subjects experimental study with 80 participants to compare understanding and engagement when working with each version. We found that building on known image schemas improved response time on look‐up tasks, while contextual detail predicted increases in persistence and the number of inferences drawn from the data. Schema‐congruency combined with contextual detail produced the highest gains in comprehension. These findings provide concrete mechanisms by which designers presenting large data sets through metaphorical interfaces may improve their effectiveness and appeal with users.