Julia Woodward and Jaime Ruiz. 2023. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589373
Designing Natural User Interfaces for Children
In collaboration with Dr. Lisa Anthony’s INIT Lab, this work explores the challenges children have interacting with Natural User Interfaces (NUIs), i.e., interfaces that use touch, speech, and gesture. Children are increasingly being presented with technology, such as tablets and smartphones, in classrooms, museums, and at home. However, children are still developing their cognitive and physical capabilities, and prior work has shown that children’s interaction behaviors and expectations are different from those of adults. For example, our prior work has shown that gesture recognition algorithms do not perform as well for children, mainly due to their motor skills development affecting their writing ability. Our goal is to build better technology and interactions for children by understanding how children interactions differ from adults.
In our work, we have examined children’s touch and gesture interactions on smartphones, tablets, and tabletops. On the tabletop, children responded more accurately to changing target locations and were more accurate touching targets around the screen. We also found that the gesture recognition rates were consistent across devices, which implies that gesture data does not have to be collected on the device that recognition will take place. Throughout our work, we provide design guidelines for children’s touchscreen interactions to inform the design of touchscreen applications for children. While our work has mainly focused on improving recognition and accuracy, we also examined children’s expectations of intelligent user interfaces that use modalities such as speech and writing. We developed a conceptual model of the children’s expectations which can be used along with our prior work on improving accuracy to further develop technology that is tailored towards children. We continue to build upon our work to further examine children’s expectations and abilities in respect to Natural User Interfaces.
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Related Publications
Min Kyong Kim, Stefania Druga, Shaghayegh Esmaeili, Julia Woodward, Alex Shaw, Ayushi Jain, Jaida Langham, Kristy Hollingshead, Silvia B Lovato, Erin Beneteau, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, Alexis Hiniker. 2022. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, Volume 34, 2022.
Julia Woodward, Feben Alemu, Natalia E. López Adames, Lisa Anthony, Jason C. Yip, and Jaime Ruiz. 2022. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 152, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501979
Alex Shaw, Jaime Ruiz, Lisa Anthony, Interacting with Computers, Volume 32, Issue 5-6, September-November 2020, Pages 524–547, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwab009
Julia Woodward, Jahelle Cato, Jesse Smith, Isaac Wang, Brett Benda, Lisa Anthony, and Jaime Ruiz. 2020. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI ’20). September 28– October 2, 2020, Ischia, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399844
Ziyang Chen, Yu-Peng Chen, Alex Shaw, Aishat Aloba, Pavlo Antonenko, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2020. In Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 635–639. https://doi.org/10.1145/3382507.3418841
Julia Woodward, Shaghayegh Esmaeili, Ayushi Jain, John Bell, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2018. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW, Article 185 (November 2018). ACM, New York, NY. 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274454
Julia Woodward, Zari McFadden, Nicole Shiver, Amir Ben-hayon, Jason C. Yip, and Lisa Anthony. 2018. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 575, 14 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174149
Alex Shaw, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2017. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 32-40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3136755.3136810
Julia Woodward, Alex Shaw, Aishat Aloba, Ayushi Jain, Jaime Ruiz, and Lisa Anthony. 2017. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5-14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3136755.3136762