Usability Evaluation with Children

Emerging technologies for children often require the involvement of children as test subjects in software development projects. Previous research studies have indicated that children behave differently than adults when involved in usability test sessions. Thus, children impose new opportunities and limitations in the evaluation and we still need to investigate proper and fruitful ways of involving children. We present two studies on usability evaluation with children. The first study involved eight children in a development project on a mobile educational device. The children evaluated a number of different prototypes. The second study involved 60 children that participated in the evaluation of an existing mobile technology where the children applied either the think-aloud protocol or constructive interaction. The results from the first study showed revealed that evaluation with a high-tech prototype does not necessarily provide more useful information, compared with an evaluation of a low-tech prototype. Our results from the second study revealed that constructive interaction provided the identification of more usability problems compared to think-aloud when the pair composition in constructive interaction is acquainted dyads