Interface Design, Web Portals, and Children

Children seek information in order to complete school projects on a wide variety of topics, as well as to support their various leisure activities. Such information can be found in print documents, but increasingly young people are turning to the Web to meet their information needs. In order to exploit this resource, however, children must be able to search or browse digital information through the intermediation of an interface. In particular, they must use Webbased portals that in most cases have been designed for adult users. Guidelines for interface design are not hard to fi nd, but typically they also postulate adult rather than juvenile users. The authors discuss their own research work that has focused upon what young people themselves have to say about the design of portal interfaces. They conclude that specifi c interface design guidelines are required for young users rather than simply relying upon general design guidelines, and that in order to formulate such guidelines it is necessary to actively include the young people themselves in this process. Introduction Children do not think in the same ways as adults (Bjorklund, 2000; Siegler, 1996). This has been recognized, for example, by the publishers of specialized reference books for children and in the separation of the children’s library from the adult’s library. Children now are using the Web widely as an information source for both learning and leisure, yet overwhelmingly they are using not specialized portals designed for children but rather adults’ search engines or portals such as Google and MSN (Large, Beheshti, & Moukdad, 1999; Large, Beheshti, & Rahman, 2002; Bilal, 2000, Interface Design, Web Portals, and Children Andrew Large and Jamshid Beheshti LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 54, No. 2, Fall 2005 (“Children’s Access and Use of Digital Resources,” edited by Allison Druin), pp. 318–342 © 2005 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois