Children and ‘Smart’ Technologies: Can Children’s Experiences be Interpreted and Coded?

This paper has a focus on young children and their emerging new technologies. It examines children’s drawings as an evaluation tool for capturing their experiences of different novel interfaces. A recent evaluation study with children and two follow-up expert coding sessions were used to demonstrate how drawings could be used and coded and how the intercoder reliability could be improved. Usability and User Experience (UX) factors: Fun (F), Goal Fit (GF) and Tangible Magic (TM) were included in the coding scheme and they were the factors that have been looked at in the coding sessions. Our studies show the thoroughness and ease-of-use of the drawing method. The method was effective and reliable in conveying the user experience form the drawings. It also shows some of the limitation of the method: e.g. resource intensive and open to evaluator’s interpretation. From the result of the study, a number of the drawings conveyed information pertaining to user experiences: F, GF and TM, and the method was particularly reliable at capturing fun. The result also led to the correlation found on the GF and TM.