Matthew Horton

Assessing usability and fun in educational software

We describe an investigation into the relationship between usability and fun in educational software designed for children. Twenty-five children aged between 7 and 8 participated in the study. Several evaluation methods were used; some collected data from observers, and others collected reports from the users. Analysis showed that in both observational data, and user reports, ratings for fun and usability were correlated, but that there was no significant correlation between the observed data and the reported data. We discuss the possible reasons for these findings, and describe a method that was successful in eliciting opinions from young children about fun and usability.

Bluebells: a design method for child-centred product development

This paper presents Bluebells, a design method that balances child-centred design with expert design in a progressive approach that marries the best of both disciplines. The method is described in the context of a museum technologies project. Bluebells comprises several new design techniques; these are evaluated and discussed in the paper. The authors conclude with guidelines for future use of the Bluebells method including the importance of providing a context for design partners and allowing them to express their ideas in ways they are comfortable with.

Giving ideas an equal chance: inclusion and representation in participatory design with children

Participatory Design (PD) in various guises is a popular approach with the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community. In studying it as a method very little work has considered the fundamentals of participation, namely how children choose to participate and how their ideas are included and represented. This paper highlights ethical concerns about PD with children within the context of information needed to consent. In helping children understand participation in PD, a central aspect is the necessity to help children understand how their design ideas are used which itself challenges researchers to seek a fair and equitable process that is describable and defensible. The TRAck (tracking, representing and acknowledging) Method, is described as an initial process that could meet this need. This is evaluated, in two forms, in a PD study with 84 children. The TRAck Method encouraged careful scrutiny of designs and allowed the researchers to distil useful design ideas although these were maybe not the most imaginative. There is a trade off between the limitations of applying such a process to PD against the benefits of ensuring fullinformed involvement of children.

CHECk: a tool to inform and encourage ethical practice in participatory design with children

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the childrens participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by virtue of two checklists that are designed to challenge researchers in CCI and HCI to critically consider the reasons for involving children in design projects and to examine how best to describe design activities in order that children can better consent to participate.

The challenge of working with teens as participants in interaction design

As participants in interaction design, teenagers offer some very unique and valuable insights both into the often-unconventional world that they inhabit and from a viewpoint that can combine elements of both child and adult perspectives. Teenagers as a user group are not often studied within interaction design and, within the field of HCI, fall into an underexplored space between the Child-Computer Interaction community and mainstream HCI. Special consideration is needed when working with this user group as methodologies developed for child or adult users may not be appropriate or entirely successful. This paper begins by defining and describing teenagers as a user population, then giving examples of how methodologies have been successfully adapted and created in order to engage teenagers in design studies. Finally the paper presents a series of challenges, opportunities, and areas to explore within this emerging area of HCI.

The Usability of Handwriting Recognition for Writing in the Primary Classroom

This paper describes an empirical study with children that compared the three methods of writing — using pencil and paper, using the QWERTY keyboard at a computer, and using a pen and graphics tablet. The children wrote short stories. Where the graphics tablet was used, the text was recognized and presented to the children as ASCII text. Measures of user satisfaction, quantity of writing produced, and quality of writing produced were taken. In addition, the recognition process was evaluated by comparing what the child wrote with the resulting ASCII text. The results show that for the age group considered, writing at the tablet was as efficient as, and produced comparable writing to, the pencil and paper. The keyboard was less efficient. Key usability problems with the handwriting recognition interface are identified and classified, and we propose some solutions in the form of design guidelines for both recognition-based and pen-based computer writing interfaces.

Methods of working with teenagers in interaction design

Teenagers are a unique but little studied user group within the field of Interaction Design. Current literature on methodologies for research with children predominantly focuses on working with younger age groups and leaves a distinct gap between this and research methodologies used with adults. The aim of the workshop is to bridge this gap by bringing together practitioners and academics that have developed and used novel methods for carrying out research with teenagers in the interactions design area. The workshop will also refine and develop existing methods, create new methods, foster new collaborations, and define new research agendas to grow the research and literature in this area.

Investigating children's opinions of games: Fun Toolkit vs. This or That

Over the past decade many new evaluation methods have emerged for evaluating user experience with children, but the results of these studies have tended to be reported in isolation of other techniques. This paper reports on a comparative analysis of 2 user experience evaluations methods with children. A within-subject design was adopted using 20 children aged between 7 and 8. The children played 2 different games on a tablet PCs and their experiences of each were captured using 2 evaluation methods which have been validated with children: the Fun Toolkit and This or That. The results showed that the Fun Toolkit and This or That method yielded similar results and were able to establish a preference for one game over the other. However, there were some inconsistencies between the results of individual tools within the Fun toolkit and some of the constructs being measured in the This or That method. Further research will try to identify any ordering effects within each method and redundancies within the questions.

School friendly participatory research activities with children

Participatory Design is a common practice in HCI and user based evaluations are also highly recommended. This paper looks at the practice of carrying out design and evaluation sessions with school aged children by describing a general method for carrying out and arranging whole class activities that are school friendly and then by analyzing the academic value of these activities. An analysis of 6 MESS days with 21 activities yielded a research out of 9 publications at a research output of 43%.

Theatre, PlayDoh and Comic Strips: Designing Organic User Interfaces with Young Adolescent and Teenage Participants

This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how to convey the idea of OUIs, how to facilitate the pupils to design OUIs and how to interpret the OUI design ideas. To convey the ideas of OUI, the Obstructed Theatre method, used in other studies with children and teenagers, was used. In this work, the salient features of the OUI conveyed in the theatre were: its malleability, its potential to bend and change shape, its association with the body and its novelty. To facilitate the design, three scenarios of increasing user interface complexity were conveyed in the theatre; and three different media (i) slime and pipe cleaners, (ii) PlayDoh and small Lego bricks, (iii) fabric and sticky shapes that afforded the creation of designs representing future organic interactive technologies were deployed. To enable the design team to make sense of the resulting designs, a Comic Strip approach was used to capture the changes in the designs as they demonstrated interaction. The paper explores this work from three perspectives; first, the effectiveness of the Obstructed Theatre approach to convey requirements of OUIs, secondly, the effectiveness of the three media used in the design sessions to encourage design solutions for OUIs and thirdly, the quality and relevance of the design ideas generated in the sessions and communicated to the design team using the Comic Strips and their applicability to other contexts. The paper concludes with some thoughts on methods and materials that could be used to encourage design ideas for OUIs and offers some of the participants more innovative ideas for the research and development community.