Children and Digital Library Interface Design

Annotated Bibliography

Bilal, D. (2005). Children’s information seeking and the design of digital interfaces in the affective paradigm. Library Trends, 54(2), 197-208. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&u=lom_waynesu&idGALE%7CA142058651&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&authCount=1&selfRedirect=true

This article studies the design of digital interfaces in regards to certain search engines, such as Yahooligans! It highlights areas such as why children feel frustration, joy, or motivation while searching through this interface. One interesting point the research points out is that even though Yahooligans is designed for young users, they prefer search engines designed by for adults, such as Google, perhaps because they don’t meet the children’s needs. However, the first step to fixing this is to gather what the children like or dislike about the interface. The authors even suggest involving children to become design partners. This would make the most sense as they, or adults working with children, will be the primary users of the interface. The authors nodded to the International Children’s Digital Library, which had developmental help from children, as a digital library best acknowledged by the field. Although the authors bring up excellent examples of designing interfaces for children, they do believe that more research and study needs to be given to this field.

Bilal, D., & Bachir, I. (2007). Children’s interaction with cross-cultural and multilingual digital libraries. II. Information seeking, success, and affective experience. Information Processing and Management, 43, 65-80. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2006.05.008

In this article, Bilal and Bachir discuss the International Children’s Digital Library, which is a children’s library mentioned throughout a lot of literature on this field. However, the authors focused on how Arabic speaking children interact with this digital library. The ICDL includes four interfaces Simple, Advanced, Location, and Keyword and the research indicated that the children in this study would tend to stay on the simple interface. The study consisted of ten children and was done in order to understand more about the perceptions the children had, the success rate at finding Arabic books, and the children’s information seeking behaviors. The authors concluded that Arabic-speaking children seek information different than children from other cultures because they have a different need, one example being having to use the drop-down to select books in Arabic rather than English.

Druin, A. (2005). What children can teach us: Developing digital libraries for children with children. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 75(1), 20-41.

The authors of this article look to examine and understand digital libraries designed for children by examining a case study on the development of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL). Through this examination, the authors conclude certain physical attributes are important to children such as size, color, and shape. Another aspect that researchers discovered was that children need customization and visualization of tools and materials. One of the more interesting aspects of the article was when they discussed how the University of Maryland brought in children to be design partners. The team of children and adults worked together, empowering the children and crafting new ideas for the digital library. The main points the authors were trying to convey was that the research indicated a want for different collections, ways of cataloging materials, and tools to use on the web.

Hourcade, J.P., Bederson, B.B., Bruin, A., Rose, A., Farber, A., & Takayama, Y. (2003). The international children’s digital library: Viewing digital books online. Interacting with Computers, 15, 151-167. doi: 10.1016/s0953-5438(03)00005-5

This paper focused on the issues that occurred while creating the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), and the initial design process for developing user interfaces appropriate for children, rather than adults. The main goal discussed throughout the paper focused on developing interface technologies that would support children using large amounts of digital information. The interface, Search Kids, is a graphical direct interface which helps children search, browse, and view query results of digital libraries. The interesting aspect of the authors’ methods was the active role children played in the development process. Children worked with adults during summer sessions and helped come up with a prototype with search options based on subject, color, shape of book, ratings, and feelings. Along with the interface, the article brought up the thought that different users would prefer different book readers based on format. However, many of the children stated they preferred the standard reader but parents thought that the comic strip reader helped the child understand the story better.

Hutchinson, H.B., Rose, A., Bederson, B.B., Weeks, A.C., & Druin, A. (2005). The international children’s digital library: A case study in designing for a multilingual, multicultural, multigenerational audience. Information Technology and Libraries, 24(1), 4-12. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=lom_way esu&iGGALE|A132710906&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&authCount=1

This article goes over the difficulties that ensue with creating the International Children’s Digital Library. The authors discuss a possible interface design criteria, current solutions and plans for the future by means of a conducted case study. Some of these issues include selection and processing (due to different copyright laws from different countries), the computer handling different character sets, different fonts, and also issues with cultural interpretations (especially with icons). These all play a part when dealing with a collection that spreads across different languages and cultures. However, the authors do bring up tips and lessons for the future, like the need for an international, intergenerational team is necessary for success.

Makopoulos, P., & Bekker, M. (2003). Interaction design and children. Interacting with Computers, 15(2), 141-149. Retrieved from http://doi.org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/10.1016/S0953-5438(03)00004-3

Throughout this paper, Makopoulos and Bekker stress the importance that children cannot be taken in as one group but need to be looked at individually based on their cogitative skills. The article is broken down into different developmental stages and describes how each stage of development needs a different thing, in simply growing and how that affects the interfaces used. Too often are children simply lumped together as one category in research when that shouldn’t be the case. However, one thing does remain consistent throughout the stages, according to the author, and that is the learning and play. The article addresses previous research that indicates the five core elements for playful learning: exploration through interaction, engagement, reflection, imagination, and collaboration. The authors indicate that current design guidelines still focus mostly on adults but they expect research to grow as children continue to interact more and more with technology.

Matens, M. (2012). Issues of access in usability in designing digital resources for children. Library & Information Science Research, 34, 159-168. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2011.12.003 Retrieved from http://doi.org.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/10.1016/S0953-5438(03)00004-3

In this paper from Library & Information Science Research, Matens discusses articles published from 1989 to 2010 on the way children’s developmental stages affect digital library interfaces and how they are used. It pinpoints different issues and suggestions that may occur when designing interfaces targeted toward children. The author goes into detail about the two key issues in designing for children: how to translate physical environments into digital; and how to translate search terms into what children will understand, as well as other issues like how quickly children within a specific age range grows out of the demographic. The article also describes preferences that children have while using digital interfaces, such as browsing. Overall, the author points out how a child’s mind is different than that of an adult and uses previous literature to demonstrate how designers need to be conscious of children’s cognitive states.

Sedighi, Z., Gilvari, A., & Nooshinfard, F. (2013). Children digital libraries and user interfaces: Proposing a set of criteria. International Journal of Information Science and Management, 11(2), 59-75. Retrieved from http://ijism.ricest.ac.ir/index/ijism/article/view/230/199

It is clear in this article that children have specific behaviors and characteristics that are different from adults. This indicates that interfaces for children should be designed specifically for them to make it easy and comfortable for them to use. The authors state that most of the current literature on children’s digital libraries focuses on designing, searching, and browsing tools or evaluation. However, the author notes that investigating the needed criteria for designing such an interface should be done. This article shows research done in this regards and develops a set of criteria based on achieved necessary T-Score. A list was created which organizes the study and gives proposes certain areas that a digital library for children should have. This will be a helpful tool for creating future digital libraries for children.

Wu, K. (2015). Affective surfing in the visualized interface of a digital library for children. Information Processing and Management, 51. 373-390. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2015.02.005

In this article, Wu came up with three conclusions to a study on IS that was performed using Taiwanese children. These conclusions were that children would rather use virtual world retrieval interfaces in regards to entertainment, rather than problem-solving; text- sound interface was easier to use for children but tended to have a negative effect by increasing a feeling of uncertainty while using it; children seeking information for entertainment purposes were more willing to endure uncertainty. One key aspect that the author expressed numerous times throughout the article was that, in regards to children, “…search interfaces can be toys as well as tools” which I agree is the mindset needed when creating interfaces for children.

Wu, K., Tang, Y., & Tsai, C. (2014). Graphical interface design for children seeking information in a digital library. Visualization in Engineering, 2(5). Retrieved from http://www.viejournal.com/content/2/1/5

In this study, the authors discuss a customized interface which was meant to help children overcome specific information seeking obstacles. They believed that current information-searching interfaces would be ineffective for children since these interfaces were designed for adults. The 104 children who participated in the study were split into two groups in order to compare the current text-based interface and the new graphical interface prototype. The researchers created hypotheses that stated that the new graphical interface prototype would be more beneficial than the standard text-based interface. All of the four hypotheses were validated through this study. Before discussing the study, the authors did go over five guidelines for designing for children, which I felt was beneficial to the study overall. 1. Apply a free way-finding approach 2. Distribute the search targets 3. Use icons based on simplified images. 4. Use both text and images as icons. 5. Establish a fun environment for information seeking. These guidelines help me, as a reader, understand why the prototype would work better than the original interface for the digital library.