Evaluation of Interactive Children Book Design

Abstract

In spite of mushrooming of interactive books apps for kids, there is hardly any evidence on “what makes a good interactive book”. In this article we provide an in-depth analysis of design issues, and give account of the explorato-ry evaluation of experience with “Little Rooster”, an interactive book designed and implemented at our Lab, first of all for research purposes. We let 7-8 year old kids to “read” the interactive book, and/or a printed, traditional version with the same content. On the basis of analysis of the video recordings of the read-ing sessions and the interviews, we list our observations on what children found of the visual and sound design, how they used (or not) the interaction facilities for control and what strategy they followed in mixing reading and interacting. We also investigated the effect of the moving, interactive images on under-standing and remembering the narrative of the story, and on understanding con-cepts nowadays usually unfamiliar to children living in a town. We finish the article with discussing experimental methodological issues and summing up de-sign considerations.