Research of WWW Interface for Children

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Designing for younger users on the Web is generating a lot of interests. This research applies Participatory Design (PD) methods on developing a community Web site for children. Seven elementary school students around 10 years old are representative users during the four-month participatory design. Based on related literature and results of a computer and Internet background survey, this research developed a children’s mental model for using computers. A series of discussion and design processes were conducted to develop prototypes of a children’s community Web site. The main tasks of all the participants were to derive the functions of the Web site, to develop the user interface, and to build up a final prototype. To elicit younger users’ needs, the PD team analyzed functions of popular communication Web sites, and then conducted structured interviews with children participants. The results indicated that: (1) Children preferred storing personal information on the Web site for sharing. They would also like to keep in touch with their friends thru e-mail, chatting room, and discussion group on the Web. (2) E-mail services provided by most Web portals could satisfy children users on file sharing by allowing file transmissions So do Chatting room and Discussion group. Therefore, this research suggested that improving current community functions of Web portals would meet children users’ needs. The PD team also developed interface design guidelines for children Web sites, including icon design and screen layouts. 5 experiments, such as children’s community websites heuristic evaluation, icon design experiment, icon design testing, interface layout experiment, and interface layout testing, were conducted. The results showed that: (1) Interactive effects such as flash animation on Web pages were associated with more usability problems than plain HTML Web pages. (2) Children preferred icons with animation, and performed good in recognition tests. (3) Children preferred Web pages with similar functions or labels grouped together. (4) The prototype proposed by this research was associated with better performance of children users than Web portals in Taiwan. Based on the results of the participatory design, this research suggests general design guidelines for younger Web users.