In the last post, we mentioned that our paper on the MTAGIC study – “Characterizing How Interface Complexity Affects Children’s Touchscreen Interactions” – was accepted to CHI 2016, a top conference for Human Computer Interaction! The paper focused on whether interface complexity had an effect on touch and gesture interactions for children and adults. We found that interface complexity affected some touch interactions primarily related to visual salience, such as response time and the amount of holdovers, and that it did not affect gesture recognition. Our design recommendations are:

1) Provide salient visual feedback of accepted input to prevent holdovers.
2) Avoid small targets at screen edge, especially for complex interfaces.
3) Consider trade-off between visual saliency and response time.
4) Train gesture recognizers for younger children with more examples.

Our future work includes running the study on a larger touchscreen display, performing a more in depth analysis of children’s gestures to support better recognition, and getting direct input from children in designing intelligent interfaces. Here is a link to our paper, our CHI Video Preview, and our presentation slides at CHI!