Kristen McGregor

Designing a Better (re) Search Engine: Recommendations from Kids

Elementary-age children (ages 6-11) are among the largest user groups of computers and the Internet.  Therefore, it is important to design searching and browsing tools that support them.  However, many interfaces for children do not consider their skills and preferences.

 

-Hutchinson et al, “Supporting Elementary-Age Children’s Searching and Browsing: Design and Evaluation Using International Children’s Digital Library” (2007)

 

 

 

 

Introduction:

 

I first became fascinated with children’s cognitive process with search engines when I read the work of Hutchinson et al. (2007) in their article, Supporting Elementary-Age Children’s Searching and Browsing: Design and Evaluation Using the International Children’s Digital Library – in which the team tracked the methods children utilize to get to an answer using a search engine process.

I am interested in examining the cognitive processes children take while searching online.  I qualitatively interviewed five children between the ages of 7 and 14 in September of 2010.  All interview subjects were familiar with searching up subject matter online and creating queries to do so.  What was fascinating with my findings was the limited resources the students chose to utilize when the whole web was at their disposal.  The majority of my interview subjects told me their typical research path was to place their search query in Google, and then review the subject matter in Wikipedia, which is often the first link that comes up in Google’s search results.  Jakob Neilsen (2010) confirms similar findings with his research, defining this tendency as a learned path bias- where children will tend to reuse the same search method they’ve used before, even if it fails them during subsequent tasks that require different navigational paths.

This narrow research process hinders the motivation to find more information about a subject, and experiment with other sources.  The answer isn’t always on Wikipedia, and while it is a great source- it is still a web-based wiki, and does need to be crosschecked.  Children finding inappropriate information while online is an understandable fear with parents, teachers and students alike and I suspect it may be a large reason of why this limited research path continues to be utilized.

With a redesigned search engine for schoolwork, where sites that come up in the search results are checked before they can appear as a result, parents and educators could be of assistance by “vetting” pages- going to pages and approving them for use.  A certain amount of page vets would allow it to become included in the Google Project web page base, which would also give the sites credibility.  I am proposing this as a “safety harness” of sorts, in order to remove some of the fears related to finding inappropriate content in the search process for children, and to get them looking at other sources of information which will help with the metacognitive process- the ability to monitor one’s current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate. (Bransford, 2000, p. 47)

The reason that the problem solving and research skills are particularly important to me comes from Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane’s (2004) The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market where they note three key skills that are least likely to be off shored or automated as problem solving, understanding the relationship between concepts and communication.

 

I have chosen to focus on designing a better search engine for school-aged kids.  Keeping several theories of cognitive development as well as my past interviews with kids in mind as I’ve done this, I sincerely believe that these improvements are excellent suggestions for Google and will pave the way for children to learn to develop their skill set with online research processes.

Foundation for Redesign:

 

There are several other search engines directed at children, such as Yahoo! Kids (kids.yahoo.com) and Ask Jeeves kids (ajkids.com) but none that reflect the unspoken gold standard of web search that Google has.  In my previous interviews with kids, they did not mention using any other search engine, with the exception of Bing (bing.com), which they all disliked. 

It’s like when you type down, uh- www.google.ca it will automatically take you to the Google thing here, and you can just type down whatever you want. It will take you to pretty much the same places as this (points to right hand corner box in Safari browser.) If you go to Bing instead, this sort of thing appears except it has a whole bunch of other stuff- which is actually kind of annoying because it has stuff only to do with Bing and it takes a little longer to load because there’s extra stuff to put in there.

-Henry, Age 14 (September, 2010)

 

Being especially inspired by the positive benefits associated with having children in the design process, not only for the end product, but for the child’s experience as well (Guha et al. 2010) I would like to propose six recommendations for Google, as well as my proposed redesign, Google Project. 

This video of my September interview subjects elaborates and provides rationale for the following six recommendations for Google, from kids. 

1.     Embedded Dictionary

2.     Clean Design

3.     Keep it Fun

4.     Help with Categories

5.     Help with Spelling

6.     Help with Homographs

 

Description of Proposed Redesign:

 

Listening to the recommendations of the children I interviewed in the video, I would like to propose the following redesign for school age children, especially when focused on project based research.  I feel that this search process will help the student researcher feel more at ease with the research process as well as facilitate a constructionist learning process that can provide an environment in which the student can continue to learn new things naturally. With this redesign, I hope to make the educational process meaningful by having the subjects partake in a discovery learning process. (Druin & Solomon, 1996)

Sample Website Page 1:

Already this page is more fun for children, while remaining close to the original Google site design.  The “project” font is inviting and lets kids know that this is a place for them.  An information section for parents and teachers will be provided to let them know that Google Project is the ideal place for their kids to do research as the research results are all vetted by parents and teachers, and that any inappropriate site reported are banned from appearing in search engine results.

 

The bulletin board link and graphic (explained under the “Sample Website 4” graphic) is already a good visual cue to have kids keep their eye out for any great information on their web searches which they can select and bring to their bulletin board.

 

Sample Website Page 2:

Using an online dictionary, links are categorized to the different dictionary definitions and sample images are brought up for each to avoid problems with homographs. 

 

Here we have the search images for “Stars in the Sky” as well as “Hollywood Star”. This allows for a quick and visual way to decipher which term the child is indeed searching for.  All of my low-tech usability study participants enjoyed this new visual aspect to the web search process. 

“As kids, pictures are one of the best ways to express our thinking. By seeing an image of what we want, instead of going to a search page with too much confusing things, it will help us think and work faster and see exactly what we want without going to google images.”

-Lia, Age 9 (December, 2010)

 

Jakob Nielsen has performed search engine studies with adults and speaks to something called “Google Gullibility.”  Web users are good at indicating their first search query, but when it fails they rarely change their search strategy.  While working with terms generated from the dictionary and moving onwards in a more visual way, I aim to minimize this with Google Project’s potential users. (Nielsen, 2008)

 

I haven’t visually indicated it here in the above illustration, but if no/inconclusive results are generated, Google’s spell checker will ask if they meant other closely spelled search terms- as this is something that children have indicated helps them with the search term process. This is an important feature to take into account when designing a program for school-aged children. (Hutchinson et al, 2007)

Sample Website Page 3:

Once the intended definition is chosen, the dictionary definition appears and helps re-affirm the search term at its most basic level.  Results appear and show the search results of the user’s intended definition of the term.  Since results are vetted, children can visit any of the results in the search and explore the websites, all while staying within the Google Project framework.  The aim with this step is for children to develop a mental model of the subject at hand, where they must reconcile what they are told by other people about a certain subject with their own experience. (Siegler, 2005, p. 345)

Sample Website Page 4:

This is Google Project’s natural extension into Google Docs, while keeping it targeted towards children. Any text children highlight/click during their search process will go into the bulletin board, as well as any pictures that children highlight/click.  These bits of text and pictures will always remain sourced, and an automated bibliography will accompany all Google Projects. This operates very similarly to a computer’s “desktop background” with the bits of text and the images acting as icons.

 

Seeing the cumulative research like this allows for the students to restructure their presentation, as well as refresh their memories about the subject matter at hand when they can see their compiled research displayed in a concise and visual way.  This technology is able to help children document their learning, which is a benefit to the development of a student’s self-regulation and reflective processes.  If children lack insight on their learning abilities- it makes it hard for them to plan or self-regulate. (Bransford, 2000, p. 97)  Teachers and students can reflect by looking at these projects and discussing the research projects before formulating them in the final design process.

 

This feature allows students to enjoy the distracting element of hypertext (Jonasseen, 1996) and get fully involved in a subject, capturing information as they go and then reviewing what they found at a later time in one central location.

 

The bulletin board is by far the most appealing thing to the children involved in my low-tech usability study. 

 

I also like the bulletin board, cause it makes it a bit easier, cause sometimes when I’m doing a search I search up for something then I forget what I searched up so I lose it and then it takes me another 10 minutes to find it again.

-Rhea, Age 11 (December, 2010)

 

I think this is very smart. After having all the good information, you get to see all of it displayed and read through some really solid answers. Having it in the form of a bulletin board makes it not only fun for us, but we can see each section of information clearly. That will help us think of ways of organizing the parts.

-Lia, Age 9 (December, 2010)

 

Sample Website Page 5:

In Google Docs, all the information will be made available in a “bulletin board” sidebar.  Users can drag and drop information into the presentation, making the focus on the organization and communication of the material in the presentation.  Any text that is placed in the presentation will be typed out into the student’s own words, and will also be sourced properly.  This allows for the knowledge-transforming strategy to take place, where a young writer aims to simultaneously meet the goal of deciding what to write, and deciding how to convey it. It is an important strategy for students to practice, as professional writers consistently utilize the strategy.  (Siegler, 2005, p. 416)

 

Doing this makes it easier for us to write a project. We get to use everything we know on one good, solid, project. And we know it’s good information. By using it in our own words, we don’t copy it, and we know it’s our work and the way we understand things.

-Lia, Age 9 (December, 2010)

Sample Website Page 6:

One of the great benefits of Google Docs is the ability to share work with other contributors. Here partners can seamlessly collaborate a project without having to be in the same room (ideal for distance education students), and parents and teachers can monitor progress to see how the projects are coming along, and to know when and where to assist a student in the process.

 

The ability to easily collaborate and communicate also links back in with Levy and Murnane’s statement- as communication is one of the three key skills less likely to be off shored or automated.  (Nielsen, 2007)

 

I actually like how everybody and lots of people can work on it if you’re trying to do it all together and you can’t be together.

-Camille, Age 9 (December, 2010)

Sample Website Page 7:

This is my favourite part of Google Project.  Once a project is completed, permission is unlocked to read presentations of other students (all pre-vetted by Google staff) that have allowed permission to access them to see their takes on the same subject matter.  No presentation materials can be taken by other students and used for their own presentations (a security system similar to www.turnitin.com will be utilized to prevent plagiarism).

 

This information-sharing step amongst peers provides a community for students.  It also allows for another moment of self-assessment and reflection- in line with the constructionist philosophy. (Druin & Solomon, 1996)

 

Participants in the usability study were insistent upon being able to place their own privacy settings on this but loved the idea of being able to easily share reports.

 

Like this part, like the settings you could decide who could see it so say if Rhea was writing something private and it was only meant for one person, she could make it private with the exception of Abbey and Lucy.

-Gemma, Age 12 (December, 2010)

Maybe you could select all the people in your class. Like my school, and my room, and then it could be private and you could type in a secret code.

-Rhea, Age 11 (December, 2010)

Every person would have a secret code and if they wanted to let the person see it they would type in the room number or the school-

-Camille, Age 9 (December, 2010)

 

 

The participants in my usability group also recommended the following additions to Google Project:

1. An iPod/iPhone application to add elements to their bulletin board.
2. Reminder settings and agenda settings within Google Project to remind students when their assignments are due.
3. Allowing the completed projects to become a blog that students can periodically review to further monitor their progress.
   

Conclusion:

 

Looking at the three skills that Levy and Murnane (2004) have stated to be less likely to be off shored or automated: problem solving, understanding the relationship between concepts and communication, it’s easy to see that the proposed Google Project helps develop all three skills in a way that follows Papert’s constructionist philosophy.  By working to develop reports about a certain subject, the mental models the student holds about the subject are re-defined according to their research. By offering a metacognitive approach to the research process, and linking the research process so closely with the school report construction it allows students to reflect about the subject matter they are taking in, and gives them a chance to see where they are in their own learning process.

References:

Bransford, J. (2000). How people learn: brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C: National Academy Press.

Druin, A., & Solomon, C. (1996). Origins of Educational Multimedia Environments. In Designing multimedia environments for children (pp. 4-61). New York, NY: J. Wiley & Sons.

Google. (n.d.). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Guha, M., Druin, A., & Fails, J. (n.d.). Investigating the Impact of Design Processes on Children. IDC 2010.

Hutchinson, H. B., Druin, A., & Bederson, B. B. (2007). Supporting Elementary-Age Children’s Searching and Browsing: Design and Evaluation Using the International Children’s Digital Library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1618-1630.

Jonassen, D. H. (1996). Multimedia and Hypermedia: Creativity Through Construction. Computers in the classroom: mindtools for critical thinking., 185-210.

Levy, F., & Murnane, R. J. (2004). The new division of labor: how computers are creating the next job market. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Nielsen, J. (2007, February 26). Life-Long Computer Skills (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design. Retrieved from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/computer-skills.html

Nielsen, J. (2008, February 4). User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design. Retrieved from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/user-skills.html

Nielsen, J. (2010, September). Children’s Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design. Retrieved from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html

Siegler, R. S., & Alibali, M. W. (2005). Childrens thinking.        Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.