Exploring Verbalization and Collaboration during Usability Evaluation with Children in Context
This work addresses usability evaluation challenges for children, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to new contexts.
The study investigated how different physical contexts affect children's behavior and performance during usability testing using think-aloud and constructive interaction methods, finding that context significantly impacts their involvement.
In this paper, we investigate the effect of context on usability evaluation. The focus is on how children behave and perform when they are tested in different settings. Two most commonly applied usability evaluation methods: the think-aloud and constructive interactions are applied to the children in different physical contexts. We present an experimental design involving 54 children participating in two different configurations of constructive interaction and a traditional think-aloud. The behavior and performance of the children in two different physical contexts is measured by evaluating the results of application of think-aloud and constructive interaction. Finally, we outline lessons on the impact of context on involving children in usability testing.