Information Technology Reference
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lish language!, many children have difficulties in
spelling (Treiman & Bourassa, 2000), and these
difficulties have been shown to be problematic in
interfaces requiring text input as shown in Read,
(2007) and Kano, Read, & Dix, (2006).
The physical size of children can adversely
affect their interaction with adult sized technolo-
gies—input and output technologies are generally
considered to need adaptation for children as
described in the ETSI guidelines for interactive
technologies for children found in Clarke (2005)
and in the discussion of interactive systems design
by Brouwer-Janse et al., (1997),
The cognitive abilities of children differ from
those of adults (Piaget, 1970); they have different
ways of processing information, their memories
are different and their experiences and analogies
are not the same as the experiences and analo-
gies that adults hold. As an example, many of
the icons on traditional mobile phone interfaces
refer specifically to adult, office applications;
for example, the filing cabinets, the clocks and
the spanners. In addition, the structure of menus
in many mobile phones has no good mapping to
children's organizational metaphors.
Recognizing these limitations, but rather than
being able to offer no new insights and anxious
to open up the debate on how mobile phone tech-
nologies might look for children in the future, I
carried out a short focus group study to discover
current practice and this was used, together with
the information gained from the study of the lit-
erature, to inform some early design ideas
What Children Do with their Phones
Given the shortage of empirical data about mobile
phone use with children and early teens, a small
focus group study was carried out with seven
children aged ten (3), twelve (2) and thirteen (2).
These children were asked to reflect on their own,
and their friends typical behaviors with their mo-
bile phones and specifically were encouraged to
recount the 'order' in which they (and their friends)
appropriated the different mobile phone features.
On getting a new phone, the first thing almost
everyone did was to customize the look of the
phone, add / allocate ring tones and then add a
few contacts. The first contacts added were gen-
erally family and tended to be the people who
were with them when the phone was first used.
At this point they would also ring some of their
friends using landline numbers (still common in
the UK but becoming less and less common in
other countries) and ask their friends to add their
new mobile numbers to their contacts. Soon after
first use, many added music where possible, and
experimented with the camera. Girls, in particular,
tended to fairly early on add birthdays and events
to their phone diaries.
After that—the users would settle into some
regular use of the phone. If it was on a pay and
go system they would add credit, would work out
how to charge the phone battery and would then
start to carry the phone with them. Almost without
exception, the focus group of children reported
that they, and their friends, spent the first six to
twelve months of their mobile phone ownership
forgetting things. They would forget to charge up,
Eliciting Designs for Children
It is beyond the scope of this article to contribute
a complete design solution for mobile phones for
children—that would take extended study. Indeed,
to gather complete ideas, a study comprising
design activities with children, (Druin, 1999,
Read et al., 2002), and interviews and surveys
with children and adults (Read, MacFarlane, &
Gregory, 2004), would be needed. In addition
parents would want to also have a say on what
their children's technologies should look like -
a method for including adults in the design of
children's technologies is recounted in Pardo,
Vetere, & Howard, (2005). As well as eliciting
ideas for new features, an extended study of use
with current phones would be useful.
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