usability testing with young children
This paper discusses two aspects of usability testing with children: First, the problems uncovered by children who have worked with the software for some time, experts, are compared with the problems uncovered by novices. Second, the suitability of behavioral observations and additional voluntary talk aloud is determined for usability testing with children. The usability of an educational software program that provides exercises directly related to beginning reading was tested by 70 children from Kindergarten 2 and Grade 1. The results show that the behavioral observations were especially useful to determine the presence of anticipated problems, while talk aloud provided information about the importance of these problems and about problems that were not anticipated. Novices encounter significantly more problems than experts, but the experts provided some important additional findings.
usability testing children observation think-aloud expertise