Drawing the User Experience of Young Children

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the trustworthiness of drawing as a method for evaluating the User Experience of young children (age 3-6). This method is not new in Child-Computer Interaction, but few studies have investigated it with young children in the kindergarten. This thesis analyses data collected in two case studies. A first longitudinal study, involving 27 participants, was aimed at investigating children’s UX when interacting with a system allowing for collective music making by physical movement. The second study, involving 31 participants, investigated children’s interaction with a tangible user interface detecting colours and emitting sound according to them. Both studies comprised a drawing activity to be run right after the end of each interactive session. Drawings were thematically analysed and contrasted with opinions gathered by adults attending the interactive sessions with the children (designers, teachers, researchers). According to the analysis, information that can be found in the drawings proves sufficiently trustworthy to capture young children’s UX, but it is strongly affected by age, and requires a mediation by teachers to be interpreted.