HCI FOR KIDS

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Introduction

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Children today are much more exposed to technology. Kids learn math & history, play games, chat with friends and even download encyclopedia from the world-wide-web. Almost all activities they indulged in, can all be supported by technologies. Thanks to great researchers who contributed time, effort and knowledge in constructing and designing effective system for young target audience. Technology advancement has changed the way children live and learn.

Dealing with children is not an easy task. Kids especially very young ones have difficulty verbalizing their thoughts. It adds challenges to designers in creating an effective, usable, purposed-served system. However, methodologies and framework for understanding the various roles of children can have in the design process, and how these roles can impact technologies are created.Cheap Custom Essays on HCI FOR KIDS

Designer have to always bear in mind that young people are not just short adults but an entirely different user population with their own culture, norms, and complexities (Berman, 177). Their own set of thinking, psychological reaction patterns and intellectual abilities differs from adults. It is common for designer to speak to parents and teacher asking what their kids or student wants instead of asking the kids directly. Adults may think that their kids need something but to a kid, that is not a need. There are advantages to solicit information from children because they can be extremely honest in feedbacks concerning technology.

With the emergence of children as an important new consumer group of technology (Heller, 18), it is critical to support children in ways that are useful, effective, and meaningful for their needs. Allison Druin believe that understanding the role children play in technology design process would lead to the answer. The better designers recognize user, the better the design of such system to serve needs.

This research paper analyzes methodologies in working with children & investigates similarity and difference between children and adults. By understanding this framework in regards to the child's role, it is easier to development practices that can have lasting effects for the future. Usability tools are use to examine HCI for kids.

Methodology in working with children

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Methodologies has been developed to observes and understand users. Individual differences, age & intellectual capabilities should be taken into account during the design. Designer and researchers came out with successful techniques to tackle problem in developing HCI for kids. Context below explain practical techniques that has been carried out in countries like Europe and United States.

Based upon reviews of literature and some exploratory studies done by Druin, there are different ways to collect data from children.

1) Contextual Inquiry techniques (CI)

) Technology Immersion (TI)

) Participatory Design techniques (PD)

Contextual inquiry technique (Bey er & Holtzblatt, 17; Holtzblatt & Jones, 1; Holtzblatt & Jones, 15; Holtzblatt & Beyer, 17) calls for researchers to collect data through observation. Children below 5 year-old have difficulties expressing themselves & verbalizing their thoughts. Therefore, designers of kid's system decided to carry out a series of observation in order to understand and capture kid's activities.

Participants would be 1 child, 1 interactor and note takers. Interactor usually initiate discussion and asked questions such as " what is this?, why do u like that? ". Interactor never took notes because child may feel uncomfortable and it is very distracting. It makes child feels like school. Interactor should act as a friend instead of steering the entire observation. Both interactor and note takers should dress in casual, informal clothes to keep away the "authority impression". Video is never used because research shows that kids tend to pretend & perform, not being themselves when confronted with camera. Note takers divide their job into categories, one will be taking down child's action (what the kid does) and the other will note down child's speech (what the kid says).

Results that were captured in quick notes will be converted into diagrams task & bubble diagrams. After a digestion period of one day to a maximum of one week, research team regrouped to chart or diagrams the experience. Later, spreadsheet or cell-based diagram in which the information is broken up into six columns Time, Quotes, Activities, Activity Pattern, Roles, and Design Ideas (Druin, et al., 17) is created.

Second methodology to be used with children is technology immersion (Boltman, et al., 18; Druin, et al., 16), an extension of CI. Druin quoted that observation on children's activities alone is not sufficient because many times children have minimal contact with technology in their homes or public area. Therefore it is recommended and wise to place children in a technology-rich environment during the observation period.

Here in a observation centre, child is provided with a technology-rich environment where they will become the decision makers. A room filled with all sort of printers, digital cameras, Macs, PCs, software(s) games and Internet access allow children to explore which is their liking or dislike. Technology Immersion is a combination of technology, time, and freedom of choice that offers researchers more opportunity to understand what children do and want with technology. The example of an on going TI experience is at CHIkids. This club supports up to 100 kids range from age -1 year-old. Children will have chance to explore technologies provided. Adults and teenagers participated and join some of their activities to act as a "facilitators", they approach children to work with them.

Participatory design technique (Bjerknes, Ehn, & Kyng, 187; Muller, 11; Muller, Wildman, & White, 14), stresses on creating opportunity to incorporate kids ideas into their design. Kids are given chance to work with researchers in developing low-tech prototype using paper, glue, string, crayon and etc. Working together with them allows designers to hear kids' idea & being able to produce what children wants in the future. Both children & adult work as design partners. At the same time, children who are not well -skilled in the development process can be inspired and empowered by their collaboration with adults to generate new ideas.

Simple guidelines for designing Children's HCI

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A Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget shows that children are lack of knowledge and experienced. Kids see the world in a dissimilar point of view which adults have doubts on what they are thinking. He divided children development into a series of stages

Sensory-motor (birth to year-old) dependent on senses.

· Software for children this young is difficult to design. Less interaction expected from babies. Input channel should be easy. Child cannot read, will need presence of an adults.

Pre-operational (-7 year-old)

· Memory can only store one thing at a time. Sequential actions confused child.

Concrete operational (7-11 year-old)

· Kids have gone to school. Knowledge and experienced gain could help in building technology. Most suitable age to work with researcher and help designer in developing prototype.

Formal operational (11 yr old and above)

· Children after this age is hard to teach because their mindset is has been molded by parents, teacher and friends.

Context below indicates CSF of a system.

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Ø Usability of System

In order to achieve Maximum performance & effective interaction, there are needs for researcher to identify their target user. In this case, working with children age 7-10 is an ideal, and treating kids as design partners allow designer to uncover the critical success factor of a successful system.

Ø Keep operation single step. Do not merge task.

Children may easily get confused with sequential operation. They tend to loose interest in a task very quickly. There is no "pause" for kids. Children usually stop playing with a system and continue when they feels like it. Avoid multi -treading task, children have short term memories.

Ø Use different sound & sight effects as feedback.

Children are sensitive towards responses; unexpected sound and action will catch kid's attention. It encourages kids to stay longer with the system, prevent them from getting bored.

Ø Use appropriate font size, color and layout.

Kids tend to collect memory easily with the presence of color. Researcher believes that the younger the target audience, the larger the font size should be. Layout of the system should be simple, complicated design does not appeal to kids because they may not find familiarity (past knowledge to support them) like adults do.

Ø Do not use metaphor that is used by common system.

HCI for kids requires different set of metaphor. Children do not have as much experienced as adults do. Lack-age of experience in outside world does not make them understand representative icons. Example, a kid may not know what is a picture of diskette has to do with this game.

Ø Avoid complicated input channels

Kids cannot use "drag & drop" function effectively. Their small hand has problems holding the mouse tightly to drag figures. Point-and-click will be more efficient.

Ø Perform user testing

Always carried out user testing stage before launching the system. Get target users to play with the system and comment on experiences. Comment and feedback shall be stated down. Consider revising and do final construction to enhance the system.

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