Interface design, web portals, and children.

ABSTRACT

Children seek information in order to complete school projects on a wide variety of topics, as well as to support their various leisure activities. Such information can be found in print documents, but increasingly young people are turning to the Web to meet their information needs. In order to exploit this resource, however, children must be able to search or browse digital information through the intermediation of an interface. In particular, they must use Web-based portals that in most cases have been designed for adult users. Guidelines for interface design are not hard to find, but typically they also postulate adult rather than juvenile users. The authors discuss their own research work that has focused upon what young people themselves have to say about the design of portal interfaces. They conclude that specific interface design guidelines are required for young users rather than simply relying upon general design guidelines, and that in order to formulate such guidelines it is necessary to actively include the young people themselves in this process.

INTRODUCTION

Children do not think in the same ways as adults (Bjorklund, 2000; Siegler, 1996). This has been recognized, for example, by the publishers of specialized reference books for children and in the separation of the children's library from the adult's library. 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 (Large, Beheshti, & Moukdad, 1999; Large, Beheshti, & Rahman, 2002; Bilal, 2000, 2001, 2002a; Large, Beheshti, Nesset, & Bowler, 2004). In some cases this might be because young people are unaware that children's Web portals exist, but even when they have encountered such portals, typically they do not use them. Is it possible to design Web portal interfaces in such a way that they appeal to young users and become their preferred entry point to Web-based information?

The interface to any digital information system--the means by which the user issues search and browse instructions and through which retrieved information is displayed--can be a major determinant in the success or failure of an information-seeking task as well as a mechanism through which assistance can be offered to the user. This article elaborates guidelines for the successful design of Web portal interfaces to be used by children when seeking information in an educational (rather than a leisure) context. Although it draws upon support from other researchers, it primarily is based upon our own research, in which we have worked with children in various ways in order to understand how they use interfaces, what problems they encounter in so doing, and what suggestions they themselves have for overcoming such problems. In particular, it will focus upon our work with students in the sixth grade of public elementary school (students of eleven or twelve years of age). Nielsen (2002), in his work with children and usability, has commented on the keen awareness that children have about their age relative to those even slightly younger or older than themselves. Our own studies support this observation. Caution therefore must be exercised in extending the following discussion either to much younger children or to older teenagers.

We shall not discuss in this article the equally important topic of Web site (in contrast to Web portal) interface design for children. Nielsen (2002) reminds us that very little is known about how children actually use Web sites or how to design sites that will be easy for them to use. He says that most Web site designs are "based on pure folklore about how kids supposedly behave--or, at best, by insights gleaned when designers observe their own children." Harbeck and Sherman (1999) propose seven principles that should be followed when designing Web sites for young children, and Agosto (2002) has developed a model of the criteria used by young people to evaluate individual Web sites.

Many authors have discussed interface design, and in such discussions it is not unusual to find an emphasis on the user. For example, Shneiderman (1998) argued that any design should be based upon an understanding of its intended users, and he includes age as one user characteristic alongside gender, physical abilities, education, cultural or ethnic background, training, motivation, goals, and personality. It is less common, however, to find in practice that interface design guidelines explicitly have taken into account youthfulness as a user characteristic, and even more unusual to involve the young users themselves in the design process.

Stevenson (2001) discusses several educational portals and assesses them in the light of eleven main categories that she considers critical for a children's portal. Broch (2000) examines Yahooligans! and Ask Jeeves for Kids in terms of children's cognitive and mechanical skills. McDermott (2002) reviews a variety of specialized subject portals that are relevant to students with homework assignments. Haycock, Dobor, and Edwards (2003) provide detailed evaluations of the twenty "most highly recommended and popular" portals designed explicitly for children's use on the Web, as well as short annotations on eleven others. Kuntz (2000), then manager of one children's portal, KidsClick (http://www.kidsclick.org), identifies five broad criteria that can be applied to evaluate children's search tools: database size, accountability, categorization, search access methods, and other features (like help, spell checking, and layout). Najjar (1998), in discussing educational multimedia user interface design, makes it clear that the guidelines were almost entirely based upon the opinions of (adult) experts rather than on the results of empirical research.

DESIGNING FOR CHILDREN AND CHILDREN AS DESIGNERS

Not all interface designs, however, have excluded children from participation in the design process itself. For example, Druin (1996, 1999, 2002); Bilal (2000, 2002a); Hanna, Risden, and Alexander (1997); Hanna, Risden, Czerwinski, and Alexander (1999); Kafai (1999), Large, Beheshti, and Rahman (2002); Large, Beheshti, Nesset, and Bowler (2004); and Large, Nesset, Beheshti, and Bowler (in press) all have advocated a child-oriented approach to design. They argue that children have a lot to offer in the design process as a whole and that it is advisable to include them in it. Children can come up with ideas that adults might not think of (Druin, 1996; Scaife & Rogers, 1999), but the downside is that they may want things included in the design that are impossible to realize.

Bilal (1999) has compared the performance by grade seven students on three Web portals specifically designed for youthful users: Yahooligans!, AskJeeves for Kids, and Super Snooper. She concludes that, as novices, children should use the portals designed for them, but she also found that each of the three portals had its own strengths and weaknesses for information retrieval. In a later study of Yahooligans!, Bilal offers a number of suggestions to system designers, who "should develop search engines with powerful searching and browsing mechanisms that build on children's cognitive and physical behaviors to search, browse, navigate and explore information with certainty and positive affective behavior" (2000, p. 662). She proposes more instructions, search examples, a natural-language interface, output ranking, simple screen displays, context-sensitive help, spell checking, effective feedback, and an online tutorial.

In our work with children we have employed four methods to explore their thoughts and ideas relating to interface design: observation, interviewing, focus groups, and intergenerational design teams. These are not mutually exclusive, and in practice we have used more than one in a study.

Observation

Observation is a technique employed in user-centered design where the user is brought in after design completion to assess the design's impact on the user. Children can be observed directly by researchers as they employ interfaces to find information. Such observation may be direct--the researcher is present while the interface is being used. This offers several advantages. The researcher can see what is happening on the display screen but also can observe the children themselves, noting their body language as well as their verbal communication. It is also possible to discuss with the children their use of the interface. A potential problem with such direct observation may be that the observation becomes intrusive, with the presence of one or more researchers influencing the behavior of the children.

In our case we opted for indirect observation. In 1998 we captured on videotape the seventy-eight sessions (with a mean of twenty-six minutes per session) undertaken by fifty-three grade six students searching the Web in groups of two or three to find information for a class project. Although the primary purpose of this research was to explore the information-seeking behavior of the students, analysis of the videotapes provided insight into how the students used two adult (rather than children's) Web portals: AltaVista and Infoseek. It might be argued that this is also intrusive, but in practice it seems clear from the irreverent comments on occasion made by the children that they quickly forgot that searches were being recorded. The main…