Designing technology for young children: guidelines grounded in a literature investigation on child development and children's technology

Abstract

This thesis is about the design of technology for children from five to eight years of age. The majority of available guidelines and principles for design or evaluation of technology support the design of products aimed at adults. The limited guidelines available for design of young children's technology do not focus sufficiently on age-related requirements or they offer high-level advice that is only useful in the planning stages of design. Working from the assumption that knowledge available in the literature provides sufficient information to support this process, my aim with this study was to demonstrate how a dependable and useful set of guidelines for the design of technology for children aged five to eight years could be derived from an existing body of knowledge.

Development of the guidelines firstly involved research into the psychological theories of children's development to identify those elements of development and the characteristics of children that may have bearing on children's use of technology. Secondly, the literature on children's development of specific skills such as literacy and mathematics was investigated. The available literature on young children's use of technology was studied next and, finally, the applicability of existing design guidelines and principles for children's products evaluated. Throughout this literature investigation the researcher gathered design-relevant factors that could potentially become design guidelines. Using qualitative data analysis techniques, more than five hundred such data elements were systematically coded, processed, analysed and categorised. The result is three hundred and fifty guidelines organised into a framework of six categories and twenty-six subcategories that integrates the relevant theoretical fields and provides practical support for designers. To demonstrate the credibility and usefulness of the emerging guidelines they were used to do an evaluation and re-design of an existing product aimed at the target group.

The thesis reports in detail on the different stages of the research, and systematically takes the reader through the process of deriving guidelines from existing theory and research findings, and integrating them into a useful framework.