Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications <s> Web portals <s> This study reports on the first part of a research project that investigated children’s cognitive, affective, and physical behaviors as they use the Yahooligans! search engine to find information on a specific search task. Twenty-two seventh-grade science children from a middle school located in Knoxville, Tennessee participated in the project. Their cognitive and physical behaviors were captured using Lotus ScreenCam, a Windowsbased software package that captures and replays activities recorded in Web browsers, such as Netscape. Their affective states were captured via a one-on-one exit interview. A new measure called “Web Traversal Measure” was developed to measure children’s “weighted” traversal effectiveness and efficiency scores, as well as their quality moves in Yahooligans! Children’s prior experience in using the Internet/Web and their knowledge of the Yahooligans! interface were gathered via a questionnaire. The findings provided insights into children’s behaviors and success, as their weighted traversal effectiveness and efficiency scores, as well as quality moves. Implications for user training and system design are discussed. <s> BIB001 </s> Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications <s> Web portals <s> Four focus groups were held with young Web users (10 to 13 years of age) to explore design criteria for Web portals. The focus group participants commented upon four existing portals designed with young users in mind: Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Lycos Zone, and Yahooligans! This article reports their first impressions on using these portals, their likes and dislikes, and their suggestions for improvements. Design criteria for children's Web portals are elaborated based upon these comments under four headings: portal goals, visual design, information architecture, and personalization. An ideal portal should cater for both educational and entertainment needs, use attractive screen designs based especially on effective use of color, graphics, and animation, provide both keyword search facilities and browsable subject categories, and allow individual user personalization in areas such as color and graphics. <s> BIB002 </s> Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications <s> Web portals <s> This study involved eleven seventh-grade children in designing interfaces for Web search engines that meet their needs. Using a participatory approach, children drew interfaces and articulated their purposes. The layouts of these interfaces varied, but the features/capabilities described in them were similar. These were, keyword searching with instructions; natural language/phrase. . . <s> BIB003
Research into the design of Web portals (or search engines-in the literature, these two terms are often used interchangeably) by children, for children is still very much in its infancy despite research findings suggesting more effective and appropriate Web portals for children are required. As BIB001 observes, because of perceived shortcomings by children of many of the existing children's search engines, many children prefer to use adult search engines. She is now herself investigating how children might design Web search engine interfaces BIB003  . Although she describes her approach as participatory design, with the participants as full design partners, unlike in Druin's methodology, no adults were involved in the design process and the 11 grade seven children worked individually-there was no design team as such. In the first stage of the study, Bilal had her participants each draw an interface on paper and on the verso list the purposes of the interfaces. After a short break, the children used a commercial children's Web portal, Yahooligans!, to search for information. They then discussed what they liked and disliked about it and noted the features they would want to add to their original drawings. Bilal interviewed each child individually to discover his or her rationale for adding the feature(s) to their drawing. She then repeated the same procedure with KidsClick, another children's Web portal. She has discovered that ''children are able to design screen layouts, dictate the features they need, and describe what these features should look like '' (2002, p. 213) . She strongly recommends that designers of children's search engines not only ensure that their engines are ''cool'' but also that they offer high usability. BIB002 focused on one aspect of a participatory design process in their utilization of a focus group approach to critique existing children's Web portals. From the outcomes of four focus groups, they developed a list of design criteria for children's Web portals. The groups focused on the screen design and organization, navigability, and usability of four different existing children's Web portals. Using a modified version of contextual inquiry, one researcher acted as a participant observer, interacting with the children, while the other researcher took notes. Rather than striving for consensus, to promote a ''permissive environment'' (Krueger, in BIB002 , the researchers encouraged the children to provide a variety of opinions and to express their own points of view. They found the focus group approach suitable for this type of research; although they recognize that peer pressure and the presence of more domineering children may play a part in group dynamics, they were satisfied that each childs voice was heard. For the most part, their results are consistent with BIB001 findings concerning children's likes and dislikes about existing children's Web portals. They conclude that children are very capable of evaluating portals and making constructive suggestions as to how they might be improved to facilitate children's information seeking. Continuing on from these focus groups,   ) have been working with two intergenerational design teams to create Web portals for children. One team incorporated eight grade six students and three adults, while a second team involved six grade three students and three adults. In each team, the children were involved from the outset in the design process leading to the successful development of two low-tech portal prototypes   ). The researchers found that the children were able to comment cogently on Web portal design criteria and generated ideas that the adults would not necessarily have developed by themselves. At the same time, the children were constrained by a lack of elementary knowledge concerning interface design principles, and they say it would be fallacious to underplay this fact. In answer to whether children and adults really can work as one, with no role differentiations, the answer was ''to some extent.'' The children genuinely accepted the adults as a part of the team and offered their ideas enthusiastically. At the same time, however, the latter found themselves leading and focusing discussions and setting agendas.