Child-personas: fact or fiction?

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a practice-based, child-centric method of creating child-user archetypes which extends adult-based persona theory to interaction design with children. Persona construction can help interaction designers better understand real child-users and result in rich child-user archetypes which are developmentally situated and contextually valid. Key differences between adult-personas and child-personas are highlighted. A description of an online mentoring application created for CBC4Kids.ca illustrates the value of child-personas in design practice.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alissa Antle, Case study: the design of CBC4Kids' StoryBuilder, Proceeding of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children, July 01-03, 2003, Preston, England [doi>10.1145/953536.953546]
• 2: Alissa Antle, Supporting children's emotional expression and exploration in online environments, Proceeding of the 2004 conference on Interaction design and children: building a community, p.97-104, June 01-03, 2004, Maryland [doi>10.1145/1017833.1017846]
• 3: Alissa N. Antle, Child-user abstractions, CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1125451.1125556]
• 4: Antle, A.N. Child-based personas: Need, ability and experience. Cognition, Technology & Work, Special Issue on Child Computer Interaction: Methodological Research (submitted).
• 5: Bach, R. Illusions, Dell, New York, NY, 1977.
• 6: Miki Baumgarten, Kids and the internet: a developmental summary, Computers in Entertainment (CIE), v.1 n.1, October 2003 [doi>10.1145/950566.950584]
• 7: Bee, H. The Developing Child, Harper Collins, 1995.
• 8: Bennett, D., Tsikalas, K. Hupert, N., Meade, T. and Honey, M. The Benefits of Online Mentoring for High School Girls: Telementoring Young Women in Science, Engineering, and Computing, 1998. http://www2.edc.org/CCT/publications_report_summary.asp?numPubId=77 Accessed January 5, 2005.
• 9: Berger, K.S. The Developing Person Through Childhood and Adolescence. Worth Publishers, NY, USA, 1986.
• 10: Åsa Blomquist , Mattias Arvola, Personas in action: ethnography in an interaction design team, Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, October 19-23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark [doi>10.1145/572020.572044]
• 11: Brazelton, B.T. and Greenspan, S., The Irreducible Needs of Children, Perseus Publishing, A Merloyd Lawrence Book, 2000.
• 12: Brechin, E. Reconciling market segments and personas. http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2002_02/reconciling_market_segments_and_personas.htm.
• 13: CBC Fact Sheet. http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/htmen/pdf_rtf/CBCfacts.pdf.
• 14: Alan Cooper , Paul Saffo, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1999
• 15: Alan Cooper , Robert Reimann , Robert M. Reimann , Hugh Dubberly, About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2003
• 16: Don, A and Patrick, J. User requirements by any means necessary. In: Laurel, B. (ed.) Design Research, MIT Press, 2003.
• 17: Druin, A. The role of children in the design of new technology. Behaviour and Information Technology, 21, 1 (2002), 1--25.
• 18: Fishel, C. Designing for Children: Marketing Design that Speaks to Kids. Rockport Publishers, Gloucester, MA, USA, 2001.
• 19: Freydenson, E. Bringing your personas to life in real life. Boxes and Arrows. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/bringing_your_personas_to_life_in_real_life.php
• 20: Goodwin, K. Perfecting your personas. http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm
• 21: Goodwin, K. Getting from research to personas: Harnessing the power of data http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters/2002_11/getting_from_research_to_personas.asp
• 22: Goodwin, K Goal-directed methods for great design. CHI tutorial (2002) http://www.acm.com/sigchi/chi2002/tut-sun.html#9
• 23: Grossmann, K.E. The evolution and history of attachment research and theory. In S. Goldberg, R. Muir & J. Kerr (Eds.) Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives, The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, USA, 1995.
• 24: Grudin, J. and Pruitt, J. Personas, participatory design and product development: An infrastructure for engagement. Proc. Participatory Design Conference 2002, 144--161.
• 25: JoAnn T. Hackos , Janice C. Redish, User and task analysis for interface design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1998
• 26: Holtzblatt, K. Personas and contextual design. http://incent.com/community/design_corner/02_0913.html
• 27: Houriban, M. Taking the "You" out of user: My experience using personas. Boxes and Arrows. http://boxesandarrows.com/archives/002330.php
• 28: Just Kid Inc. An environmental scan of children's interactive media from 2000 to 2002: An executive summary prepared for the Markle Foundation, 2002. http://www.markle.org/markle_programs/project_archives/2002/justkidinc.php
• 29: Mikkelson, N. and Lee, W.O. Incorporating user archetypes into scenario-based design. UPA Workshop, 2000.
• 30: Myers, R. Stages of social-emotional development in children and teenagers. http://www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/development/erickson.shtml.
• 31: Lene Nielsen, From user to character: an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios, Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, June 25-28, 2002, London, England [doi>10.1145/778712.778729]
• 32: Piaget, J. Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge, Viking Press, New York, NY, USA, 1971.
• 33: Pringle, M.K. The Needs of Children' Routledge, State, USA, 1986.
• 34: Pruitt, J., Jamesen, H. and Adlin, T. Personas, user archetypes, and other user representations in software design. UPA Workshop, 2001.
• 35: John Pruitt , Jonathan Grudin, Personas: practice and theory, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences, June 06-07, 2003, San Francisco, California [doi>10.1145/997078.997089]
• 36: Mike Scaife , Yvonne Rogers, Kids as informants: telling us what we didn't know or confirming what we knew already?, The design of children's technology, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1998
• 37: Singer, D.G. and Revenson, T. A Piaget Primer: How a Child Thinks, Plume Books, NY, USA, 1996.
• 38: Van Der Veer, R. The Vygotsky Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA. USA, 1994.
• 39: Wartella, E., O'Keefe, B. and Scantlin, R. Children and interactive media - A compendium of current research and directions for the future. Markle Foundation, May 2001. http://www.markle.org/news/digital_kids.pdf
• 40: Peta Wyeth , Helen C. Purchase, Using developmental theories to inform the design of technology for children, Proceeding of the 2003 conference on Interaction design and children, July 01-03, 2003, Preston, England [doi>10.1145/953536.953550]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

Keywords:
children, interaction design, personas, user abstraction, user-centred design