Keywords

1 Introduction

There are limited studies in abstract representation of children with severe Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). User abstraction is a useful technique in interaction design to anticipate user. Children with ASD are usually defined by diagnosis of ASD; deficits in communication and social behavior, stereotyped behavior, and restricted interests and activities [12]. We believe creating personas for children with ASD makes them more familiar, intimate and easier to empathize their characteristics and abilities instead of recognizing them with a set of diagnosis. Persona creation also forms a common platform for communicating these children with designers, developers and therapists.

Interactive technologies are promising to improve skills of children with ASD [3, 7]. Therefore, usability and accessibility is required to build successful interactions. Our research focuses on personas as a tool for user abstraction to help developing playful smart technologies including multimedia content and connected tangible object which aim at improving learning skills of children with ASD.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the building blocks of Personas for children with ASD and, eventually, to form a foundation document. We present a foundation document based on literature review and our field studies. Theoretical findings cover Personas literature. On the other hand, empirical findings have helped us to feed the foundation document by considering particularly our target user in target context. We have observed children with ASD while playing with playful interactive technologies that we have developed. We have collected qualitative data to identify what type of characteristics and behaviors should be considered when composing Personas. Our Personas foundation document integrates theoretical and empirical findings which will help us to design Personas and contextual scenarios systematically and rigorously in the future.

The following section will be a brief introduction in Personas. The third section will explore the content of a foundation paper for creating Personas of children with ASD. We will reflect our theoretical findings in the first part and we will discuss our empirical findings in the second part. In the following section, we will define the content of the categories for our foundation document. Last section will discuss the concluding remarks.

2 Personas

Personas are introduced to interaction design literature by Alan Cooper in 1999 in his famous book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity” [5]. Personas are powerful and useful tools to represent abstract users. They are fictional characters based on characteristics, needs, and behavior patterns of actual users [10]. They are usually based on user studies to communicate actual attributes of actual users [4, 9, 11]. Furthermore, user studies help to create unbiased personas, especially child-based personas where designers tend to attribute their own memories, experiences and characteristics to abstract a child [6].

There are limited Persona studies in accessible design, for children with ASD to be more precise. When designing for people with limited capabilities in terms of realizing physical and mental activities, creating Personas becomes more useful not only to facilitate developing empathy and anticipation but also to facilitate sharing a common platform amongst designers, developers, caregivers and families [7, 10].

3 Developing the Foundation Paper

3.1 Theoretical Findings

Personas have been studied and created since Cooper [5] has introduced the term in interaction design. These studies mostly targeted users without disabilities, or limited physical and/or mental functions. Furthermore, there are limited studies in persona creation for children with ASD. Therefore, we have investigated Personas for accessible design purposes. Our theoretical findings explored elderly-based personas, child-based personas and personas for children with ASD in order to acquire knowledge to create a relevant and complete categories for foundation document.

Including images and demographic information of the fictional character is mostly a shared category no matter whom the user group is. Photos, once Persona is written, are useful to communicate and anticipate the described fictional character [9]. Demographic information usually includes name, age and gender of a Persona.

For a typical user, Pruitt and Grudin [9] have defined an umbrella term Overview to provide information on user’s family, business and such information. Antle [1] has also defined a generic name for this content; Descriptive attributes where family structure and school of the child is written. In accessibility, rather than an umbrella term, this content is better to be called as information on Educational credentials [7] and Medical history [7, 10]. We believe these categories would provide a better understanding of children with ASD since both health and education are important chronic facts about them.

User’s Daily routines and Activity types are important to understand a typical day and preferences of a child with ASD [6, 7, 9, 10]. It is also useful to consider contextual routines namely Playtimes and Playing venues as decribed by Moser et al. [8]. Even though computer literacy has only been identified by Leal et al. [7] and Pruitt and Grudin [9], we believe it is important to describe user’s Computer skills, knowledge, and abilities when completing a Persona.

Antle [1, 2] uses a generic term Experiential goals where contextual task-oriented technology goals are identified based on a project. Here, we would like to focus on projects similar to ours. da Costa et al. [6] has conducted a user study to design a political educational game for children and Moser et al. [8] has explored children’s gaming behaviors and requirements; all for the sake of creating child-based Personas. Therefore, they have precisely identified their contextual goals and behavior patterns; Gamer style and Game preferences including game genres and game features [6, 8].

So far, generic and technology-wise categories for Personas were elaborated. Ultimately, we need to elaborate exclusive abilities and behavior of children with ASD in order to adapt the content of Personas for our target user. Developmental abilities, suggested by Antle [1] are the theoretical understanding of children’s abilities for Persona creation. According to Leal et al. [7], these abilities embody the characteristics of Receptive-expression language, Social interaction level and Communication and adaptive behavior (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Content of foundation paper for Personas. Blue boxes indicate selected theoretical categories for our Personas foundation document. (Color figure online)

Full size image

Some Personas use Quotes from user studies to highlight a sayings of a user. Since children with ASD have problems in expressing themselves verbally, we suggest the use of short videos to represent them in a more expressive way. These videos should give hints on user’s mental model to make the empathy easier. We believe using short videos will be useful to achieve what Persona creation aims which is to communicate the fictional user to all stakeholders and abstract the user as representative as possible.

3.2 Empirical Findings

Personas should rely on the information collected on actual users in order to represent an accurate abstraction [4, 9, 11]. They should also include relevant content with the context. Here, we try to find categories for our foundation document through qualitative data we have collected. We have conducted two field studies for two different projects. Both of the projects provide interactive and multimodal playing opportunities for children with Intellectual Development Disorder (IDD) to improve learning and social skills at a therapeutic center as aimed in our Personas context.

We have recorded these play sessions for video analysis to observe children’s behavior and reaction to interactive technologies. Our analysis was based on the variables formed by observable signals which are developed by the therapists of this therapeutic center. After our analysis, we have come up with clusters of behavior and interaction types. In this section, these clusters will be evaluated to arrive at context-wise categories for the foundation document.

As mentioned earlier, both of the projects embody interactive and multimodal technology. Our first study Teo possesses a smart configurable robot and a connected multimedia content. Our findings of the first field study show the importance of Robot interaction, Screen interaction, Self-expression, Performance, Attention loss, Creativity, Stereotypes and Social play during the play sessions with an interactive and mobile robot [3].

The second study is equipped with a smart tangible object and a connected multimedia content. We have observed signals under the clusters of Tangible object interaction, Screen interaction, Self-expression, Task accomplishment, Scaffolding, Play interruption, Creativity and Imagination, Stereotypes and Social play.

Smart object interaction, let it be robot or tangible object, and screen interaction are the contextual technology goals of our study, in other words are the categories under experiential goals. We have observed the capability of self-expression as an externalization of needs and manifestation of positive and negative emotion. Self-expression is part of developmental abilities and related to receptive-expression language. Task accomplishment skills, presence of attention loss, use of Creativity, and Social play skills are all part of developmental abilities. Furthermore, social play is connected to communication and adaptive behavior.

4 Defining the Content of Foundation Paper

Overview

Demographic information includes name, age, gender and family structure of the fictional character.

Educational credential is the descriptive information on user’s educational background and ongoing program.

Medical history involves information on user’s health conditions chronically.

Daily routine provides information on how the user schedules and manages his/her everyday life [10]. The aim is to present the tasks and obligations as part of a typical day of the user to all stakeholders. Furthermore, information on playtime, user’s typical schedule (routine) for playing, should be introduced here as well [8].

Activity types are the implementation of activities of choice. These tasks and actions are to understand what the user does besides his/her routines. Playing venues should fit here to tell the playgrounds the child prefers to play.

Computer skills, knowledge, and abilities show the computer literacy to understand user’s capability in using computer.

Experiential Goals

Smart object interaction shows the relation child builds with the object in terms of communication and manipulation [3]. The aim is to define the child’s interest in the object taking his/her actions (e.g. approaching, exploring, touching, etc.) and design attributes (e.g. attracting color, shape, size, etc.) of the object into consideration.

Screen interaction shows the relation child builds with the multimedia content. Screen interaction is important to understand child’s preferences in receiving an information, demand or feedback via user interface (e.g. text, image, video, audio).

Gamer style is to understand the user’s attitude and behavior when playing a game and the character he gets into as a gamer [6].

Game preference includes the user’s preferences in genre of games and game features [6, 8].

Developmental Abilities

Receptive - expression language involves the input (receiving) and the output (expressing) language skills or preferences of the user. Receptive language (input) of a child is to understand the preferred tools for comprehension (e.g. visual or oral material, the structure of these material, etc.) [7]. Expression language (outoupt) of a child shows the preferred tools for self-expression (e.g. verbally or non-verbally including writing, drawing, eye or physical contact, the structure of this language, etc.) [3, 7].

Social interaction level shows the events that influence child’s social interaction skills [7].

Communication and, adaptive behavior includes child’s attitude towards other people and behavior in the classroom [7]. Social play skills are important aspect of this content too. Therefore, decentralization (turntaking) and cooperative learning skills should be elaborated here.

Task accomplishment elucidates child’s achievement of any given tasks in order to understand if the child needs scaffolding or any additional instruction [3].

Attention loss is to understand what triggers distraction for that particular Persona.

Creativity: involves child’s imagination skills and originality in making up plays.

Illustrative Elements

Photo use is necessary to communicate Persona pictorially. Pruitt and Grudin [9] suggests the use of photos of local people rather than stock images.

Quotes from the user enriches a Persona with his/her own words.

Short video enhances a Persona by showing how the user performs his/her actions.

5 Concluding Remarks

This framework outlines the important and relevant content particularly addressed to children with ASD in the context of interactive technology. The benefit of this work is to create a common platform for Personas not only used by all stakeholders but also built by them too. With the help of Personas in this application domain, remote and customized interactive therapy sessions can be implemented which would reduce costs and increase effectiveness of sessions which disregards user diversity today.

Based on our foundation document which integrates theoretical and empirical findings, we will design Personas and contextual scenarios systematically and rigorously in the future. Short term follow-up study will be the design of Personas for children with ASD. Long term study will be to design playful interactive technologies tailor-made for user diversity.