Child–Computer Interaction: From a systematic review towards an integrated understanding of interaction design methods for children

Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) is a steadily growing field that focuses on children as a prominent and emergent user group. For more than twenty years, the Interaction Design for Children (IDC) community has developed, extended, and advanced research and design methods for children’s involvement in designing and evaluating interactive technologies. However, as the CCI field evolves, the need arises for an integrated understanding of interaction design methods currently applied. To that end, we analyzed 272 full papers across a selection of journals and conference venues from 2005 to 2020. Our review contributes to the literature on this topic by (1) examining a holistic child population, including developmentally diverse children and children from 0 to 18 years old, (2) illustrating the interplay of children’s and adults’ roles across different methods, and (3) identifying patterns of triangulation in the methods applied while taking recent ethical debates about children’s involvement in design into account. While we found that most studies were conducted in natural settings, we observed a preference for evaluating interactive artifacts at a single point in time. Method triangulation was applied in two-thirds of the papers, with a preference for qualitative methods. Researchers used triangulation predominantly with respect to mainstream methods that were not specifically developed for child participants, such as user observation combined with semi-structured interviews or activity logging. However, the CCI field employs a wide variety of creative design methods which engage children more actively in the design process by having them take on roles such as informant and design partner. In turn, we see that more passive children’s roles, e.g., user or tester, are more often linked to an expert mindset by the adult. Adults take on a wider spectrum of roles in the design process when addressing specific developmental groups, such as children with autism spectrum disorder. We conclude with a critical discussion about the constraints involved in conducting CCI research and discuss implications that can inform future methodological advances in the field and underlying challenges.