Could a tangible interface help a child to weigh his/her opinion on usability?

Abstract

Research in the Human-Computer Interaction field needs to design interactions adapted for users and to rate opinion or personal perception of the interactions. Applied to the education field, one of the challenges of HCI is that it relies on the design of user-interfaces and interactions designed to meet pupils and teachers' requirements. To evaluate designed interactions, researchers currently use scale-based questionnaires like Likert's. For now, most of the time data collection is different between pupils and teachers. Indeed, young respondents have less experience than adults and could be more limited in their ability to express themselves. Several studies show that children tend to select extreme answers on these scales. To reduce this bias, we investigated the role of tangibility. We developed a prototypical device to help them to "weigh" their opinion. We conducted a preliminary study with children. First, our results show that our tangible interface seems to engage young respondents to metaanalyze system usability. Secondly our prototype seems to reduce extreme responses.