Kindertivityusability and communicability strategies for interactive surfaces and pre-kindergarten children

Resumen

Multi-touch technology has become one of the most emergent technologies and has had an enormous growth since its initial steps in the eighties to be widespread accepted and used in the present. On the one hand, multi-touch technology relies on the direct manipulation interaction style which gives users the advantage to view the objects and actions of interest, replace typed commands by pointing actions and to perform rapid, reversible and incremental actions avoiding using complex instructions. On the other hand, several works have evaluated the virtues when joining direct manipulation with direct-touching showing that it solves the problems inherent in other interaction devices, such as those involving mouse or keyboard. Hence, taking advantage of the intuitive and natural interaction provided by multi-touch technology it seems an ideal way to support educational scenarios targeted to kindergarten children. Although several works have assessed the suitability of using the direct manipulation style with children, there is a lack of works addressing the use of touchscreen devices by this specific type of users. Moreover, there is a growing trend of designing educational and playful applications targeted to kindergarten children based on touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets. In addition, several reports point out that children use touchscreen devices even before they are able to speak and they are frequent users of devices such as smartphones and tablets. However, despite this growth in the use of multi-touch technology by children and its apparent suitability to be used to develop applications targeted to young children, there is a lack of standardized and universally accepted interactions for young children when using touchscreen devices since only two basic gestures are commonly used (basically, consisting of only one-finger touch for selection and one-finger drag for movement). Hence, there is a need of carrying out empirical studies to help and advance in the design of applications that adequately support and fit with children's development and skills. Therefore, this thesis proposes, designs and evaluates several usability and communicability strategies tailored to children in their early development stage to establish the design and development of future applications targeted to kindergarten children. These strategies will lead to define appropriate design strategies that enable infants to take full advantage of multi-touch technology, would make it possible to develop attractive new applications and, eventually, could also aid children's cognitive and motor development.