My colleague Quincy Brown and I had a paper accepted to the CHI 2012 workshop on Educational Interfaces, Software and Technology (EIST), titled “Toward Comparing the Touchscreen Interaction Patterns of Kids and Adults.” Our paper presented analysis on differences we have found between children and adults in the ways that they use touch and gesture interaction, including challenges of touch target acquisition and gesture generation. The long-term goal of this work is to design and develop interactions that are more successful for children by taking into account these inherent differences. Here is the abstract:
Touchscreen interactions are increasingly more commonplace with the mainstream adoption of devices like the iPad and iPhone. Kids are using their parents’ devices for entertainment, learning, and discovery, but the interactions have not always been designed with kids in mind. In this paper we discuss the results of our explorations of differences between children and adults on a dataset of touch- and gesture-based interactions. We find evidence for significant differences and discuss how these can be considered in design.
The camera-ready version of the paper is located here.
Lisa Anthony 