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A STUDY ON COGNITIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDREN ’ S INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE USING PARTICIPATORY DESIGN TECHNIQUE

When the design process involves the participation of children, it requires methods that take into consideration the users’ characteristics such as immature cognitive ability, language skill, motor-sensory capability and shyness so that it can effectively elicit their needs. In response to such demand, a variety of methods and guidelines specialized in children have been developed from the 1960’s. Participatory design deals with design problems allowing users to participate in design process and generate ideas with the aid of generative toolkits and workshop. Therefore, participatory design allows designers to look at problems from children’s standpoint and simultaneously overcome children’s immature language skill or shyness. In this research, two participatory design toolkits – ‘Info Block’ and ‘Info Tree’ – are introduced. As tools that can elicit user needs in information architecture design for children’s websites, they allow users to collaborate and build the structure that reflects their cognitive process. In the case study, the toolkits are applied to evaluate the usability of the directory structure of Yahoo! Kids, Korea (from now on, Yahoo Kids). The result shows that children’s information architecture differs from that of adults in depth and breadth, clarity of contents and logicalness, and that the novel methods can effectively elicit users’ needs.