Impact case study database

Impact on Policy

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference for Interaction Design and Children (IDC) changed its publication policy as a result of our research and guidance. Prior to this there was no formal requirement to state the ethical practices within research papers involving Interaction Design with children. As a result, new guidelines have been incorporated into the conference from 2016. All researchers must now describe how ethical permission was obtained and papers can be rejected based on missing data around the participation of children in research [B]. Submitted papers must have a section entitled ‘Selection and Participation of Children’ and will be rejected if this is omitted. This has influenced the behaviour of researchers around the globe working within the area of Child Computer Interaction. The former Chair of the ACM IDC conference series (2016 – 2018) Prof Ole Sejer Iversen said: “As introducing ethics as a concern in Child-Computer Interaction, the ChiCI group pioneered our understanding of the fundamental ethics of doing research with children. This included … an ethics section in all international research papers submitted to the ACM IDC conference from 2016 and onward.” [A, B]

Giving Children a Voice in the UK and Worldwide

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that ‘[e]very child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them, and to have their views considered and taken seriously.’ Our research has enabled both industry and young people to become engaged with each other in the design of computer games and apps created for their use. Our impact emerged from giving a voice to children and young people allowing them to contribute to the creative sector through participation in the design of computer games and apps. Such engagement provided them with a greater understanding of usability issues and stimulated their career aspirations. The ChiCI group have been working with National Curriculum KS2 children in local schools. Alan Brindle, Headteacher of Heskin Pemberton’s C of E VA Primary School, Chorley states: “The children can take a pride in the fact that their opinions and input have had an impact on important studies and research in such an important field.” The children “had benefitted in a number of ways,” and Brindle goes on to say “Working with the latest technology enables our children to make clear links between their computing curriculum … and ‘real life’ applications.” [C]

Young children are also invited into the university for ‘MESS days’ (Mad Evaluation Sessions with Schoolchildren). Children take part in activities that typically include evaluations of products, design sessions, small research studies, and purely fun activities. The MESS day epitomizes our approach to research and interaction design with children. It should be messy, inclusive, fun, fast paced and constantly refreshing. One child from All Saints year 4/5 produced a highly decorative letter of thanks [D]:

As a result of our visits and MESS days, schools have described a subsequent effect on children’s aspirations as David Bradshaw Computing Coordinator for St Anne’s Catholic Primary School comments: “It is easy for the children to make clear links between their interests in computing and future educational and vocational pathways.” [E] Joe Dryland, Head Teacher for Kirkham St Michael’s Primary School said that, “Working with well-respected academics had heightened our profile, despite being a primary school, as a seat of learning and education. Our school is seen as a proactive establishment in adopting technology and immersing young children in the possibilities that it provides.” [F]

Raising aspirations and worldwide collaboration with children

Complying with Article 12 of the UNCRC is an ethical and moral imperative for the IT industry across the world. Ole Sejer Iversen notes the international aspect of the ChiCI team’s impact: “Janet Read and her team … have had a remarkable impact on the international child-computer interaction research since 2003. They were some of the first researchers to study and report on how children were actively engaged in the design of digital technology, and to state that children should have a voice in the design of children’s’ technology. Their research has provided novel prototypes, methods and techniques that has been recognized world-wide.” [A]

By involving children in participatory design, we can raise quite young children’s aspirations and increase their cultural engagement and understanding. St Anne’s Catholic Primary School, Leyland commented that the visit by the ChiCI group provided ‘clear information about career options in computing,’ and furthermore they were: “ Giving the children the opportunity to experience using new equipment and technology and the chance to discuss the real-life application of developing technologies. Often the children in our school are end-users of technology and the … visits help to get them to think about how technology can be developed to serve a purpose rather than just to be consumed” [E].

A series of STEM enrichment activities in Clitheroe, Kirkham, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Hanoi and Mumbai, working with children aged 5-14, have led to the design of the Stones app. Stones is a project funded by the University of Central Lancashire to develop a mobile game suitable for children from all corners of the world to play. What is novel about the Stones project is that the ChiCI research team gathered design ideas for this game from children across the globe. The aim was to encourage outdoor activity, creative play and to facilitate an imaginative adoption of the app. The game also needed to be sustainable from an environmental point of view, and accessible to children regardless of their location and technology. Joe Dryland commented that, “ From the perspective of the children, the benefits to their learning has been huge. Very few children would ever get the opportunity to develop APPs for children in other countries or support the development of future technology.” [F]

Our research on ‘Cool’ and mobile design influenced the design of the Stones app to be effective and attractive to young people. The app provided a pathway for children to move from solitary indoor activities on mobile devices to outdoor face-to-face play with other children. Surveys carried out before and after the design sessions have shown that children are empowered by participation and their aspirations were raised. Collectively, we engaged with many children in participatory design. We met with children in the UK, Iceland, United Arab Emirates, USA, Malaysia and India, all of whom helped collaboratively contribute to the design of Stones. All the children who participated in the design sessions were invited to visit the Stones website where they could comment on the work to date. A boy aged 8 said: “I really enjoyed the day and it is great that my ideas have been included in a game. I did not think i could help make a game for children like me.” A girl aged 9 said, “It is good that my idea is looked at and included in a game. I did not think children help make games.” [G]

Assisted by our research publications in this area [4], professionals and organisations have adapted to changing cultural values within the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) environment. One example of this is the development of the Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) community. Within the HCI4D agenda, Sim and Read have continued to work and contribute to capacity building across Asia. For example, Sim in 2020 was part of the student design consortium for India HCI, setting the theme for the competition and judging students work. Whilst Read has also promoted CCI methods in Indonesia to academics and industry practitioners at several ACM UX Indonesia events. [H]. Dr Eunice Sari, CEO and Co-Founder of UX Indonesia comments: “Prof. Read has been an instrumental part of the HCI and UX community in Indonesia. Her method of design for the minor, i.e., children and aging people, is inspirational. Her down-to-earth and creative design thinking approach to work with the end-users has bridged a lot of gaps in getting the best insights from the minor users to design new solutions to improve quality of life. Her research is very unique and pivotal especially during the Covid-19 pandemic as she brilliantly mixes the fields of HCI, education, and design to solve problems.” [I]

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the international work that we planned in 2020 preventing us from completing our work in the ways we had intended. We have engaged with over 500 children and young people in both developed and developing countries but, because of the ban on travel, it has been difficult to complete the circle with the children in the ways we would have liked to. Robust evaluations of the impact of our engagement have not been possible with schools and communications being so disrupted.

The work carried out by University of Central Lancashire’s Child-Computer Interaction Group (ChiCI) impacts on the IT design industry and, consequently, on the children that use, consume and interact with computer-based games and applications. Our impact is to have changed industry practice and policy, and that of software designers by providing free to use tools that enable ethical and practical child computer interaction research and product development [A, C, D, F and J]. Our research activities and courses delivered worldwide have also helped shape industry practice and policy, for example with the BBC, who have changed how they deliver apps to the 4.1 million children users within the UK [A]. The Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati, India, has said that our “course has enabled us to acquire the skills and competencies … thus increasing our capacity to conduct participatory design sessions with children.” [B]

Use of UCLan User Experience methods to shape BBC policy

Our work with the BBC, in conjunction with Amberlight [C] has changed how the corporation delivers content via tablet apps to 4.1 million children in the UK as well as for others around the world. We designed a survey tool for twenty families whose children had mild physical impairment or learning difficulties and asked them to fill in diaries over a two-week period. Based on the analysis of the data they provided, the BBC have changed their policy. Prior to our work the BBC’s main delivery of an app was via their website and children were not accessing games through this platform. Our research contributed to the decision to place the games through app stores such as the Google Play Store to ensure all children could find the games. In addition, modifications were made to the accessibility settings of the games so that parents could more easily interact and assist all children to gain the best user experience, further enabling their participation in online activities. Modifications to the games and the delivery has therefore also impacted on many of the 73,000 children in the UK who have complex cognitive or physical needs who use BBC software [C]. This was a further impact from our study which has led to improved social inclusion, in the form of access to games, for these children and families. This study is seen as good practice from the sector as the participatory design survey methods involved users ‘from the margins’ rather than those who represent the middle-ground experience. The work with the BBC instigated changes to the corporation’s games accessibility guidelines. These guidelines are used by UX teams and games developers within the Children’s BBC team for products distributed across various platforms online and in app stores. The findings also influenced the reshaping of the CBeebies games delivery roadmap to include a new evaluation milestone which included children’s accessibility needs [A]. Suzanne Clark, Senior UX Designer BBC Research & Development said: “As a direct response to the findings from research conducted by Amberlight and UCLAN in 2017, the BBC updated its mobile accessibility guidelines to include more specific requirements around designing and testing for devices with alternative inputs.” This is now part of the BBC’s Mobile Accessibility Guidelines. She goes on to describe how further BBC development occurred because, “The work also informed our ‘How to’ guide on the BBC Global Experience Language blog, and enabled us to communicate problems faced by users as we designed games for motor accessibility exemplars.” [D]

ChiCI UX Playbook and website and Fun Toolkit applications

The ChiCI UX Playbook and website has been developed to enable practitioners to use and adopt our methods. Five of our methods have been identified and transformed into educational materials and can be accessed from the site: The Fun ToolKit [1]; Drawing Intervention [2]; CHECk Tool [3]; MemoLine [4] and RAiD [6]. These tools have enabled organisations and researchers across the world to work ethically to obtain data and make informed decisions about the user experience of technologies for children [H]. Prof. Panos Markopoulos, Vice-Dean Director of Research at Eindhoven University of Technology commented: “In my research projects and collaborative projects with industry concerning the design of outdoor games for children and games to support social interactions between children, I have…used the Fun Toolkit quite regularly. I estimate that my team has applied it to evaluate at least 20 different interactive prototypes over the last ten years. A recent example of a successful industrial application concerned the evaluation of Oopsie Heroes (https://oopsieheroes.com/\) an application to help young children stop bedwetting. The system which has been launched as a commercial product was co-designed with children, and the Fun Toolkit was an essential instrument for obtaining feedback regarding the interactive prototypes developed during the design and development process, and thus helping ensure children would enjoy interacting with this product that concerns a very sensitive part of their life.” [E]

The Fun Toolkit ensures that accurate, practical and reliable feedback from children’s user experience can be fed back into computer design. It comprises of three separate tools that can be used together or singly. They are the ‘Smileyometer’, the ‘Fun Sorter’ and the ‘Again, Again’ scale. It has been promoted to over 200 practitioners, 250 academics and industrial software engineers at courses and workshops in the USA, India, Indonesia and the UK. Dr Eunice Sari, CEO of UX Indonesia reports that the ChiCI group’s methods “have been widely adopted by practitioners within the UX community in Indonesia.”[F] It is featured in industry standard websites, such as ‘ALL ABOUT UX: Information for user experience professionals,’ as a validated method of ensuring that the feedback gained from evaluative workshops using children contributes successfully to innovations in design and delivery of new products [G]. These methods have been transformed into training and development materials for the use of IT researchers and industry professionals. Alongside the Fun Toolkit we have ‘Drawing Intervention’, an easy-to-use method of evaluating children’s drawings while giving reliable scores across different interfaces and coders; the CHECk Tool, which instructs and encourages ethical practice in participatory design with children; MemoLine, which captures children’s user experience longitudinally; and finally, RAiD which enables large numbers of young participants to engage in feedback and evaluative processes. This suite of methods and tools have enabled organisations including the digital consultancies KANO and Amberlight [C] and child participation computer researchers to work ethically with young people and obtain data that gives them informed decisions about children’s user experience of technologies. Shu Ting Huang Software Product Lead for Kano said: “As an organisation we have a tradition of working with children in usability and UX work. The usability tools from the ChiCI group at UCLan are the first we have seen that are specifically designed for children that are appropriate to industries like ourselves. Before these tools being made available, we have had to rely on usability and UX tools that were intended for adults and have had to make adjustments to make them work with children. The UX Playbook and the associated tools will enable us to carry out more effective and more child-friendly usability and UX evaluations.” [I]

Capacity Building

The Smileyometer is popular across industry in applications where feedback from children is required. Examples include a Royal Holloway Research Project called ‘Children and the Police: Investigating children’s perceptions of the police, and the way that the police work with young children’; another freelance UX designer, Paris based David Phanouvong, has used the tool to assist a company called Pandacraft in the evaluation of a themed play ‘box’ app they send on a monthly basis to their 3-to-12-years-old subscribers; the ‘influential’ Malaysian blogger ‘Flying Dance’ recommends its use for blog evaluation; it is used in a study involving children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) playing drums to evaluate their feelings of enjoyment and fun; the Danish University of Aalto lists the Fun Toolkit on their ‘Experience Platform,’ an ‘open community for people interested in experience research’ and further international usage is demonstrated by the Fun Toolkit being available from the Brazilian website for UX designers Célula de Design e Multimídia [J].

Use of the Fun Toolkit is paired with the courses and workshops we deliver, in association with universities that host these events around the world. This has resulted in an increased capacity of academics to deliver Child Computer Interaction methods. For instance, our workshop, ‘Teaching the Next Generation of Child-Computer Interaction Researchers and Designers’ at Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference 2020 was attended by 40 participants. The Indian Institute of Technology at Guwahati hosted our Advanced Course in Methods for Child Computer Interaction and have incorporated our methods into their curriculum at post graduate level, resulting in joint publications with the Child Computer Interaction Group and their Masters students. Abhishek Shrivastava, Assistant Professor in the Department of Design comments that: “the course proved highly novel and helped the delegates in learning newer methods for evaluation with children. Across several different informal feedback sessions following the course, we have learnt from delegates that the course was effective in terms of imparting relevant knowledge aimed at engaging children and designing products for them. … Overall having this course at IIT Guwahati has benefited the staff and students who attended and helped increase our understanding and awareness of methods that are appropriate for working with children.” [B]

The methods from the course have also been adopted into teaching in universities. At Eindhoven University of Technology Prof. Panos Markopoulos, Vice-Dean Director of Research said that his “colleagues and I have been using the Fun Toolkit quite extensively: … Between 2008 and 2015 myself and my colleague Prof. Tilde Bekker delivered a one-week master’s level course, (total effort for students 40hours, on average 20 participants per year) covering Interaction Design and Children. The Fun Toolkit was taught to students who used it in their practical assignments. At TU/e we follow a challenge-based education model in which students learn by taking on real-world challenges. Roughly 40-50 student projects every year concern children as users of technology for learning, entertainment and health. I estimate that at least half of these projects have applied one or the other part of the Fun Toolkit because of its versatility…In short, I would like to appreciate my warm appreciation for the Fun Toolkit, but also the other works of the ChiCI group relating to co-designing with children. They have been inspiring and directly useful for our own work.” [E]

A number of schools and companies have been unable to complete their projects with us as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Kano says “Since being introduced to the UX Playbook by the ChiCI team in February 2020, our work with children has been limited

due to the ongoing COVID crisis” [I]. We have also been prevented from collecting further feedback data from schools due to the pandemic.