Hello, and welcome back. It is my turn to share one of my favorite success stories of user interface design with you. And I want to talk about the International Children's Digital Library. But before I talk about this specific system, let me posit this problem for you. So let's say I come to you and ask you to design a digital library for kids. In fact, let's even keep it simpler. Design just the search feature of the digital library for kids. So if this task was given to me before I learned how to do good interface design, I would have said, okay no problem. There's lots of searches that I could just copy. So maybe if I have a search page, it just needs a search box, and a go button. And with the library, maybe I'll need to give some options for how to search, maybe by title or by author. And then, once somebody does a search, all of the books are going to pop up here. But right, you wanted this to be for kids, so yeah, kids like color. So I'll just throw some colors in there. And kids also like wacky cartoon mascots, so let's get that up there. And maybe it can encourage them to read and stuff. So, this is the approach that bad design for kids frequently takes. So, it's kind of very superficial, it's just saying kids like colors, kids like cartoons, let's throw that in on top of an adult interface. And let me talk about an alternative instead. This alternative approach was taken by the HCI Lab at University of Maryland in developing the International Children's Digital Library. So instead of guessing at what kids would like, or going with superficial features like colors or cartoon characters. They worked directly with children as design partners to understand how the children would design a library search feature. They called their inter-generational design partnership Kidsteam and it was led by professor Allison Druin, she's a professor at the University of Maryland. So this makes sense, as one of the Kidsteam members said that making technology for kids without them is like making clothes for someone you don't know the size of. In this case, trying to make a library search without understanding how kids remember, search for, and explore books, that would have been unthinkable. So by going through this process, they found out that kids wanted to look for books in very specific ways. For example, kids remember books by the color of the cover, not the name of the author or the name of the book. They also may be looking for a book of a certain length, because maybe they only have time for a short bedtime story. Or maybe they need a long book for a book report. Or they make like books with certain types of characters, like kid characters, or real animal characters, or fantasy characters. This is really how children think about books, and how children search for books. And this is very different from the kind of search that I would have come up with as an adult. Kids also have this distinction between picture books and chapter books, which I think is very important for us to understand. And adults don't frequently understand. The result of this creative process is that the International Children's Digital Library has 3,000,000 unique visitors. It has thousands of books in over 50 languages and is used around the world. It has been named one of the 25 best websites for teaching and learning. That's incredibly impressive for a nonprofit research project, given that most of it is really programmed by students. And by the way, the creative search is part of this success. After the site's creators analyzed the hundreds of thousands of searches done on the Children's Digital Library, they found that the visual kid design search was used 71% of the time. Compared only to 10% of the time that people tried to do the text based search, the naive design that I presented at the beginning. So I picked this project for my case study, because when I was an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Maryland, I saw this project and it totally blew my mind. As a student I thought that making cool technology was just about being a good programmer. I didn't think that it was about asking questions, working together, and being open to new directions. The children's digital library project really opened my eyes, and made me rethink my approach. My takeaways were that users may have a different way of conceptualizing problems, especially when users are different from you. Maybe they're kids, maybe they're experts on some topic, maybe they're elders. A good designer works to understand the issues from the user's point of view. And good designer is made possible when working with users rather than trying to guess at what they will like or going for superficial features. If you want to find out more about this project, you can read more about it on the Kidsteam project website. This is through University of Maryland HCI lab website. You can try out the general library at en.childrenlibrary.org. And if you have access to papers through the ACM Digital Library. You can read Alison Durins original paper on Cooperative Inquiry With Children there. So thank you for listening and I hope to see you in the next video.
