Predicting effectiveness of children participants in user testing based on personality characteristics

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment to determine which personality characteristics can be used to predict whether a child will make an effective participant in a user test, both in terms of the number of identified problems and the percentage of verbalised problems. Participant selection based on this knowledge can make user testing with young children more effective. The study shows that the personality characteristic Curiosity influences the number of identified problems; a combination of the personality characteristics Friendliness and Extraversion influences the percentage of verbalised problems. Furthermore, the study shows that selection of children based on these criteria does not lead to finding an unrepresentative sample of the product's problems.

Keywords:

• Children
• Test participants
• User testing
• Personality characteristics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Silvia Crombeen and Mariëlle Biesheuvel for conducting the user tests. We would also like to thank the children and teachers of primary school de Brembocht for participating in our research. Furthermore, we would like to thank Prof. Dr. G. Keren, Prof. Dr. C. Snijders and three anonymous reviewers of this paper for their constructive advice. The Innovation-Oriented Research Program Human-Machine Interaction (IOP-MMI) of the Dutch government supported this research.