Building Child-User Abstractions: Need, Experience and Ability

Our fundamental notions of childhood are socially constructed and change over time as documented by Calvert in her book, “Children in the House” [8]. As a result, it can be very difficult for designers of interactive media for children to distinguish between a specific group of childusers and current cultural representations of children, their remembrances of childhood and their personal experiences with children. Methods for creating child-user abstractions must deal with this problem. This brief paper gives an overview of a method for creating child-user abstractions. By using this method, designers can use both theoretical and empirical information about children’s needs, experiential goals and developmental abilities to create rich and relevant child-user abstractions.