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Find it if you can: usability case study of search engines for young users

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Abstract

The Internet is an integral part of the lives of our children nowadays. Using the Internet, in particular search engines, children search for information for school, for their individual interests or simply for entertainment. Unfortunately, research shows that children face many difficulties when searching and browsing for information, even though there are several search engines that are designed especially for children. In this paper, we review recent work in this field and evaluate to what extent current search engines for children are appropriately supporting the motor and cognitive skills of elementary school-age children. We base our study on findings of previous research and derive criteria to assess existing search engines. Our results suggest that most of them still require improvements in order to fit the skills and competencies of children.

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Notes

  1. KIM is a German acronym for Children and Media (“Kinder + Medien, Computer + Internet”).

  2. These numbers indicate the subjective feeling of success and may be falsely overestimated.

  3. Elementary-age children are approximately in the beginning of Piaget’s concrete operational stage of development. In this stage, children begin to reason logically, but their understanding is limited to concrete and physical concepts (in contrast to abstract ones).

  4. The monitor resolution used in their study was 1,024 × 768 pixels. We used a resolution of 1,366 × 768 pixels on a 16:9 display in our study.

  5. The targets used in the study were circles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Tatiana Gossen, Julia Hempel & Andreas Nürnberger

Authors
  1. Tatiana Gossen
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  2. Julia Hempel
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  3. Andreas Nürnberger
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Correspondence to Tatiana Gossen.

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Gossen, T., Hempel, J. & Nürnberger, A. Find it if you can: usability case study of search engines for young users. Pers Ubiquit Comput 17, 1593–1603 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0523-4

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