Higly Engaging e-Book Experiences

HEBE: Highly Engaginge-Book Experiences
Monica Landoni - Luca Colombo
monica.landoni@usi.ch - luca.colomo@usi.ch

HEBE Outline
What: Novel interfaces for playing, interacting and reading e-books for children
How: By building a collaborative/participatory design environment
Why: There are lot of generic e-readers no one specific for children. Native digital?
Where: Libraries, nurseries, schools, homes (?)
Who: Children of three different age groups: 3-5, 6-9, 10-12. Other stakeholders like parents, teachers and book experts.

Background
Findings of a series of users studies (e.g. Wilson et al, 2003; Landoni et al, 2001; Malama et al, 2005; Landoni and Hanlon, 2004)on how adults interact with e-books in different scenarios of use (including education and entertainment)
HEBE will explore how children can be involved into the design and evaluation of novel, engaging, intuitive interfaces.

Children as Special Users

Aim and Purpose
Make the reading experience more attractive to younger audience
Involve children in exploring different type of technology, hardware and software, in order to produce more engaging, usable and fun e-book interfaces for them.

Hypothesis
… in order to make e-reading a fun experience for children, new innovative interfaces are needed and children have to take an active role in their design.

Research Questions
Can e-books for children add extra value to the reading experience?
Are e-book models developed for adults still valid for children books or should these be expanded or even completely reconsidered to take into consideration specific children needs?
Are new design approaches needed in order to make children e-books fun and usable?
How children of different ages interact with e-books?
Do different ages need different e-book models?
What are the main activities related to reading, children would perform on e-books and how can these be better supported?
How can children be effectively involved in the design of children e-books?
How can children be effectively involved in the evaluation of children e-books?

Children Books
Attractive and let children explore them in different ways.
Engaging pop-ups, opening flaps, scanimations, etc…
Reading as part of the experience of interacting with a book, unique and personal to each child.
As young children are supervised in their experience by adults it turns into a social moment.

Books Beyond the Content
Objects (containers) as well as content. Appearance and presentation as important as content.
Ways into an imaginary world where children, even before being able to read, freely interact with them in all sort of creative way.
Building block! Pages can turn into puzzles, maps and circuits, covers into crowns, frames and cut-out dolls
Boundaries between children books and games are very fuzzy.

Children: Reading and Technology

The International Children's Digital Library, (ICDL),
declared goal "... to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community” see:
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

ICDL iPhone Screen Shot

ICDL iPad Screenshot

Leap Frog: Tag Reading System

vtech: Storio

Nintendo DS: Flips

Inside Flips

Wall-Book:

Paper vs Electronic Books
Paper has often been accused of being passive, static and a real limitation to authors’ and readers’ creativity.
Paper books for children are great examples of the contrary.
Designing interactive e-books for children in competition with paper is a big challenge.

Technology and Reading
Tangible, ubiquitous, wearable devices that together with an environment supporting multimedia can make interacting with a book a really multi-sensory immersive experience.
We will explore a number of platforms and devices and exploit their potential as book support.

E-readers

Smart Tables

Smart Boards

Smart Phones

Encouraging Reading
Local and international initiatives to engage children in reading.
Libraries, teachers, parents: all stakeholders.
In Ticino and Italy: Born to read (Nati per leggere).

And Now?
We are organizing a series of user studies involving children in different relevant settings
Different e-readers
A bookshelf of titles of real interest to children
In paper and electronic format
Building a Bookshelf for children is a little project per se, partially sponsored by Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

Higly Engaging e-Book Experiences

by UXconference on Oct 12, 2010

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Higly Engaging e-Book Experiences — Presentation Transcript