Exploratory Voice-Controlled Search for Young Users: Challenges & Potential Benefits ?

To date, children come more and more often into contact with information systems. Unfortunately, these systems are usually designed for adults and the increasing group of young users has been widely neglected. In order to create and support children’s information seeking appropriately, we have to consider their specific state of development resulting into different needs and capabilities. In this paper, we discuss the design and the results of a user study to analyze exploratory voice-controlled search of young users. Exploratory search nicely reflects real-life information needs and voice-controlled interfaces have the advantage that children do not need to have good spelling skills. Hence the interaction can be more intuitive and motivating. We gained first insights into the children’s search behavior in context of exploratory search and identified design issues for similar studies. Furthermore, we illustrate the challenges and potential benefits of interactive voice-controlled search systems for young users.