Digital Library Interfaces for Children: The Effects of Visual Navigation on Usability

1. Digital Library Interfaces for Children: The Effects of Visual Navigation on Usability Glenda Revelle, Benjamin B. Bederson, Allison Druin, Dana Campbell, Allison Farber, Juan Pablo Hourcade, Juhyun Lee, Yoshifumi Takayama Teachers and students of Yorktown Elementary SchoolBowie, Maryland

2. SearchKids: A Digital Library Interface for Children • Completing third and final year of NSF-funded Digital Libraries project • Visual interface to digital libraries for young children (early elementary) • Enables children to search a multimedia database of information about animals

3. This Year’s Focus • Continued our collaborative design process, including children, teachers, and researchers • Currently evaluating the effectiveness of SearchKids visual interface • Compares 2nd and 3rd graders use of SearchKids to more traditional, less visual alternatives

4. [Demo] “Original SearchKids” “Traditional”

5. Research Design • Goal: understand effectiveness of SearchKids interface features • 140 students from Yorktown Elem. School (half-way done) • Independent Variable: • Interface - traditional AND one of: • Full SearchKids • SearchKids with no images • SearchKids with no animation • SearchKids with neither images nor animation • Grade • Gender • Dependent Variables: • Speed • Accuracy • Subjective Satisfaction

6. Research Design (cont.) • Children asked to find as many items as possible in 15 minutes (items spoken by test administrator) • Search tasks include specific animals (e.g., dog) and categories of animals (e.g., something that lives in water) • Half used traditional interface first; half used SearchKids version first

7. Preliminary Results • Preliminary analysis on Original SearchKids vs. Traditional (with ten 2nd graders and eight 3rd graders) • Number of kids tested too small to know about statistical significance yet, but some patterns are emerging

8. Preliminary Results:Search Outcomes • Looking at three measures: • Total # items completed during session • # “right” items found • # “wrong” items found • Grade effect for total # items completed: • 3rd graders found 12 items • 2nd graders found 9 items

9. Preliminary Results:Search Outcomes (cont.) • For # “right” items found: • 2nd graders submit more right answers with SearchKids • 3rd graders submit more right answers with traditional • But, this effect occurs only on category search tasks • For # “wrong” items found • 2nd graders submit more wrong answers with traditional • 3rd graders submit more wrong answers with SearchKids • Again, this effect occurs on category search tasks

10. Preliminary Results: User Satisfaction • Original SearchKids rated as being more useful than the traditional, text-based approach • Boys rate SearchKids as being less “fun to use” if it has no images, whereas girls rate it as less fun without animations

11. (Preliminary) Conclusions • SearchKids enables young children to perform complex queries more effectively than traditional text searches • In other situations, traditional text search proves more effective

12. (Preliminary) Conclusions (cont.) • Young children perceive a visual search interface to be more useful and more fun to use than a traditional text interface • Therefore, your choice of interface should depend on the age of the children, and their tasks. www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/searchkids