A guide on conducting better market and user research with kids
From making it a game to letting kids be the experts, there’s a lot we can do to improve how we draw insights from children.
Kids are a really interesting source of knowledge and insight in the creation of new technology and digital experiences. They’re highly expressive, brutally honest, and have seamlessly integrated technology into their lives while still not fully understanding how it works.
They pay close attention to the visual appeal and entertainment-value of an experience, and will very quickly lose interest if a website or app is “boring” or doesn’t look quite right. They’re more prone to error when interacting with a digital experience and way more likely to experiment and play around with elements that aren’t essential to the task at hand.
These aspects of children’s interactions with technology make them awesome research participants and testers when researchers structure their sessions correctly. This is no easy task however, as there are lots of methodological, behavioral, structural, and ethical considerations to take in mind while planning out how your team will conduct research with kids in order to achieve the best possible results.
This isn’t to say that it’s impossible, however. In fact, market and user researchers who have been working with children for decades are quite open about sharing their tips and tricks of the trade, which have resulted in dozens of academic and editorial articles being published online on the ethical guidelines, structural considerations, and methodological experiments behind planning out and facilitating meaningful research with kids.
After writing my article on the lessons from child-computer interaction that we should adopt into the rest of UX earlier this month, which included many of the benefits of conducting user research with children, I figured that I should write a primer for the newly initiated on best practices for conducting that research.
This is a synthesis of everything I’ve learned from the articles above, dozens more, and conversations with experts in the fields of interaction design and child-computer interaction. Below this are, in no particular order, the requirements and tips that I believe are most important to conducting effective and meaningful user research with children.
Keep it ethical.
This isn’t really a tip (I promise they’re coming!), but it is the most important consideration while planning out research that involves children.
Getting permission from the parents or legal guardians of your participants for their participation in the study, maintaining informed assent from the kids themselves throughout sessions, determining the risk of their involvement with the research, and ensuring that there is some benefit to the participatory party are all essential components of planning out and facilitating your research.
Thankfully, there are a ton of resources for establishing the ethical guidelines for your study. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is an essential foundational read for anyone working with children, the Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC) Compendium serves as a great handbook for the considerations that need to take place in choosing participants, running studies, and publishing results. There are also multiple academic publications on ethical frameworks specific to conducting user research with children (like this one on the CHECk tool by Janet Read!).
Reading through these resources as well as researching any further ethical frameworks and tools you find interest in along the way will equip you with the knowledge necessary to structure a safe and ethical study for all involved parties.
Ensuring that your process is ethical and safe for your minor research participants does create additional background work for your team, but it’s more than worth it in the comfort and security it brings to your participants and their families as well as in ensuring the credibility of your process and results.
Consider gamifying some of your research.
Gamification involves introducing mechanics and aspects of games into non-game settings (for an in-depth look at what this means and some examples, look to this article on it by Dave Eng). An example of this would be creating a task-based leveling system in an educational app. Gamifying research in both the user and market research fields has been a hot-button topic for years now, which thankfully means that we have some proven strategies for success.
Adding a narrative to open-ended interview questions has had statistically-significant positive effects on the response length of participants (Michał Ścibor-Rylski, 2021). Introducing gamification elements like points, prizes, and game design patterns has been proven to improve children’s completion rate of empirical studies (Brewer et al., 2013). Fully fleshing out the visual design, narrative, and instructions of any gamified research methods can enhance children’s enjoyment of the process (Rodríguez et al., 2020).
If you don’t have the time to read through each of those, let me sum it up: gamification is really good for keeping children (and adults, really) motivated and engaged throughout your studies. The more seamless the implementation of gamification in the study, the better.
Gamification can be implemented as part of your research in a variety of ways, too. Surveytainment involves just making the copywriting and graphics in your questionnaire more fun. Soft gamification can include things like providing feedback, narration, challenges, and competition. Hard gamification, the most involved approach, involves specially designing board and narrative games for use in your research (Gorączka & Protasiuk, 2020).
For a succinct walkthrough of some of the components of gamification and how these can apply to market research, check out Varun Bhat’s article “Gamification : The new way of conducting Market Research”.
If you take the time to introduce just one of these approaches or elements into your research with kids, you’re likely to see great results in the amount and quality of data you’ll be able to collect.
Give the kids time.
Children are fussy. They need time to adjust to their surroundings. They’ll need potty breaks and snack breaks. They need time to make friends with the other kids present for your study, and probably the researchers too.
The point being, you’re going to need way more time than you think to complete way less than you originally had planned.
This is why it’s very important to estimate how long your research session would take in an ideal situation, and double or triple that to get the amount of time you’ll schedule with your participants.
I’m serious. This insight came from Alexis Lauricella, an expert on children’s interactions with technology and a UX Research Manager for the Kids and Family Team at Google.
Give kids time to be kids. This will make them more comfortable, ensure that you’ll have enough time with them to collect your minimum viable research (here’s an article by qonita if you need a refresh on that concept), and hopefully have time to spare so that your participants’ parents can exchange phone numbers to set up play dates between newly forged BFFs.
Let them be the experts.
Kids like to be taken seriously, and when it comes to their opinions of and interactions with digital products, they should be. Children are the foremost experts on what they want and need from the digital products they interact with, so research with them should be structured around ensuring that they know their insights are valued and essential.
As a result of child-computer interaction researchers’ understanding that kids know what kids want a whole lot better than they do, they have adopted many practices and methods that revolve around making kids the expert consultants to their process.
Child-computer interaction experts will often categorize the involvement of children in the design of new technology in four ways: the child as a user, tester, informant, and design partner. These categories are associated with a greater degree of involvement in the design process as they go along, and can intersect depending on the many ways children might interact with that technology during its development process.
Children as users contribute by using the technology while adults might be present to observe or record them, testers are again observed with the technology but are also asked to comment and give their feedback on it, informants are involved with various tasks like consulting the design process or giving feedback on prototypes, and as design partners they contribute as equal stakeholders with a high amount of input on the design and development of the product (source).
There are several benefits to letting children fill any of the above roles, but in particular the informant and design partner roles allow for a huge amount of input from them to shape your product into something tailor-made for kids.
Methods involved with the informant role include interviews, focus groups, and prototype testing. What is critical here is that children are involved consistently throughout the design process, allowing them to feel empowered by the experience and share as much input with researchers as possible.
The research methods involved with the children as design partners role are included under the umbrella of cooperative inquiry, which is comprised of contextual inquiry (to observe what children do with what technologies they currently have), participatory design (to hear what children have to say directly by collaborating on the development of “low tech” prototypes), and technology immersion (to observe what children do with extraordinary amounts of technology).
There are also other ways to involve your child research participants as experts, such as maintaining a role playing narrative of them being lead designers at your company throughout the day or asking them to complete research of your own.
All in all, involving children as expert consultants and stakeholders in your design process gives your team a fresh perspective on how to enhance the way children interact with your products, as well as giving the kids a sense of ownership and empowerment involving a technology they might eventually use.
Think about your surroundings.
Keeping kids engaged with and contributing to your research for hours at a time requires fine tuning. The space your research takes place in is part of that fine tuning, and for good reason.
Spaces hold association in people’s minds that affect their mindset, can contain distractions that might negatively affect your research participants’ engagement, or could contain props that support your research process.
These effects of space are amplified when you’re working with kids. Too playful a space and you might end up with a rowdy focus group, but if it’s too sterile, your participants might be afraid to speak at all.
Experimentation on the settings research with children should take place in has been going on for years, and we have some great insights to pull from the world of academia.
For example, the article “Usability testing with children: Laboratory vs field studies” (Razak et al., 2010) concludes that field studies are better for understanding children’s user experience than it is with testing for usability problems, and that laboratory studies are better for evaluating user interfaces and children’s interaction with digital products.
Building on this, “Exploring Verbalization and Collaboration during Usability Evaluation with Children in Context” (Khanum and Trivedi, 2013) concludes that field studies enhance children’s verbalization, as children tend to express themselves much more openly in their natural environment.
When research with kids is completed in a controlled laboratory environment, “Using Gamification to Motivate Children to Complete Empirical Studies in Lab Environments” (Brewer et al., 2013) suggests that researchers should pay special attention to balancing distractions in the environment, maintaining a small amount of purposefully placed toys and props to keep them motivated without completely diverting attention from the study.
“Toddlers’ Learning From Socially Meaningful Video Characters” (Lauricella et al., 2011) adds that sensory distractions can affect the engagement and quality of response in child research participants, so research teams must be careful not to overwhelm younger kids with a mixture of visual and audio stimuli in the research space.
“The Effectiveness of Gamification in the Online and Offline Qualitative Marketing Research” (Rylski, 2021) claims that sterile and quiet environments, the presence of other people, and the possibility of being observed could negatively impact participants’ ability to engage with research-related role-playing and narratives.
All in all, these studies lead to the conclusion that your environment is extremely important to how child participants will engage with your research, and that which environment you choose to conduct it in depends on your methods used. I recommend reading through some of the papers on the effects of contexts and environments on user research to determine what is best for your study before moving forward.
Think very carefully about the amount (and type) of people present.
Another important aspect of the setting your research studies with children take place in is the people present for it. Controlling the amount of children, guardians, and researchers present in the space can lead to better data and results, as these groups can affect both the distractibility of your participants and the pressure they feel during the study.
As far as the amount of kids present goes, research suggests that including more than one child in a research session promotes better verbalization and the comfort of participants. “Design Research by Proxy: using Children as Researchers to gain Contextual Knowledge about User Experience” (Doorn et al., 2013) suggests that children have a much different dynamic with their peers than with a researcher, one which allows them to share ideas and collaborate much more openly.
It is noted in “Using Gamification to Motivate Children to Complete Empirical Studies in Lab Environments” (Brewer et al., 2013), however, that ideally these are kids who don’t know each other. Children with a preexisting relationship can end up biasing and distracting one another, or a power dynamic between them might determine how often each child participates. Because of this, it is recommended to recruit multiple kids for your study who are of similar ages but haven’t met before.
Another strategy in determining groups of children for research participation involves taking into consideration the sensitivity of the material covered in said session.
For example, “Understanding of Puberty and Human Reproduction in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence” (Lauricella et al., 2016) involved researchers separating focus groups of children not only by age but also gender identity, so that they would feel more comfortable and open sharing their understanding of puberty and reproductive anatomy.
As far as the inclusion of adults in the research space goes, research suggests that parents can enhance the comfort of the kids particating, especially when conducting research with the under seven crowd, but can also pressure them or bias results.
“Design Research by Proxy: using Children as Researchers to gain Contextual Knowledge about User Experience” (Doorn et al., 2013) describes two situations in which adults were present for research, one helpful and one negatively impactful to research. On the helpful side, one mother provided encouragement and suggestions while her child was completing participatory research. In contrast, another case is described in which adults acted as if one child’s participatory research was a disruption to a group gathering and pressured the child to complete their research quickly and quietly as a result.
There are also other cases in which it is best not to include familiar adults in the research space. In the puberty and human anatomy focus groups I touched on earlier, parents and other familiar adults were not included in the room to ensure that participants would not feel pressured to censor their understanding of reproductive anatomy.
Whether or not you feel it would be best to include parents and guardians in the research space is up to your discretion and determination of the sensitivity of material, so make sure to make this a consideration before planning out your research sessions.
From my research, the best tactic seems to be as follows: if you determine that adults should be present for your research with child participants, make sure to prime them on how to behave during the sessions. Cover how often they should be interacting with their children, where they should be in the room, whether or not they should give their children feedback and how they should do it, and why this all is.
Parents naturally want to help their children, but if you make it clear that this is all about gathering their kid’s unaltered opinions, they’re likely to understand and comply with what you need them to do.
The people present during your research with kids make much more difference than we realize. Kids are heavily influenced by their surroundings, so the other kids and adults around them can really impact your results. Make sure to take that into account while planning your next research study with children, and you’re likely to see great results.
Choose your methods wisely.
The research methods that are best for use with children vary a lot depending on what age you’re working with, what information you need from them, and your perspective on how involved children should be in the design of user experiences made for them.
Thankfully, we have multiple frameworks that give us some guidelines on how we should go about choosing the right ones for your research team.
“A Method Impact Assessment Framework for User Experience Evaluations with Children” (Sim & Zaman, 2017) defines a framework for choosing the right user research method based on the role of the child, the user experience construct, the system, the epistemological perspective of the researchers (which is defined and covered well in this article by Poetic Mindfulness), and practical and ethical concerns. Researchers can check each possible research method they might use against this framework to determine if it is right for their study.
“On the assessment of usability testing methods for children” (Markopoulos & Bekker, 2003) provides another framework for determining the right methods to use in your studies with children. The first section of the framework involves assessment criteria for research methods including their applicability to the research at hand, reliability, validity, thoroughness, and efficiency. The second section covers characteristics describing. research methods such as the amount of participants, role of the evaluator, tasks, data capturing method, procedure, and context involved. Finally, the last section touches on the characteristics of children that may impact the process and the result of using different user research methods.
My perspective is that the characteristics of the children you’re planning on working with is of particular importance. Children’s capacity to verbalize their thoughts, ability to concentrate, their motivation, ability to adjust to new environments, logical and abstract thinking skills, and much more can vary depending on their age, gender, or even individual personalities.
Obviously, these characteristics make a huge impact on the amount and quality of data you’re able to collect when working with kids. Thus, after you determine which methods are appropriate for your study, you should consider which ones work best with your target research participants’ age range and gender(s).
One example of children’s ages affecting which research methods can be used with them is touched on in “Evaluating the effect of gamification on the deployment of digital cultural probes for children” (Rodríguez et al., 2020). In this article, it is noted that cultural probes are not ideal for use with children younger than ten due to the disruption it can bring to their lives as well as their ability to express their thoughts through writing not being as well-developed as older children.
Another example of age affecting how research methods must be considered and modified shows up in “Understanding of Puberty and Human Reproduction in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence” (Lauricella et al., 2016), in which the authors state about interviews and focus groups,
“Those wishing to engage children before the onset of puberty may therefore need to be especially assiduous in brainstorming ways to make conversations interesting and relevant to this set.”
In the case of this study, the interviewers paid specific attention to continuously prompting the kids and relating the focus group subject to their lives. Making research method facilitation interesting and relevant to children can take place in a variety of ways, though, with the gamification tactics I mentioned earlier being another example of how this can manifest.
Examining the research methods you plan to use against frameworks and considering how they’ll play out in use with the specific group you’re working with is extremely important, as you want to be sure that you’re getting as relevant and complete of data from the kids you’re working with as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
Planning out and facilitating research with kids is complicated. You have to consider what, when, where, and how research will be conducted to make things work and get as best of insights from your child participants as possible.
If I were to sum things up for those of you who just want the TLDR: make sure every aspect of your research is thoroughly considered and serves the purpose of keeping your child research participants engaged and verbalizing as much as possible. Leave nothing up to chance, because if kids have the opportunity to get distracted or disengaged they’ll likely do it.
There’s so much more to conducting productive and insightful user and market research with kids. There are specific things you need to consider when warming up for a session, editing your interview questions, determining how to present your research facilitators to the kids, and more. I recommend looking into any aspect of running user research with kids that you’re unsure about or interested in learning more on. Here are some great sources for learning just a bit more than I can fit into a Medium article:
- The International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction
- The work of Janet C. Read
- The work of Alexis Lauricella
- The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
These resources cover just about everything, and the works of Janet C. Read and Alexis Lauricella provide some great specific case studies on how research methods can be used and modified for use with children.
I hope you enjoyed reading through my guide and learned something useful for your next research study involving kids!
