Little Backpackers – Studying Children’s Psychological Needs in an Interactive Exhibition Context Petri Saarinen, Timo Partala, Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila Tampere University of Technology Dept. of Pervasive Computing / Human-Centered Technology P.O.Box 553 FI-33101 Tampere, Finland firstname.lastname@tut.fi ABSTRACT Psychological needs have become an important viewpoint in understanding user experience (UX), however there have been few attempts to operationalize the existing need theories for studying children’s experiences. The aim of this research was to experiment with two methods, a laddering interview and a new quantitative theory-based questionnaire, in studying the fulfillment of ten basic psychological needs. A mixed-method approach consisting of these methods was tested in evaluating an interactive children’s activity called Backpack Tours in an exhibition center with 18 children of 6-9 years of age. The laddering interviews made it possible to connect the designed elements of the activity to fulfillment of six psychological needs: pleasure-stimulation, relatedness, self-actualization-meaning, autonomy, physical thriving, and competence. The quantitative results showed significant variations in the children’s evaluations of the fulfillment of the ten needs. The results of the evaluation are useful in understanding the strengths of various design solutions and as a basis for further development of the activity. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User interfaces – User-centered design. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors Keywords Interactive technology, exhibition center, children, psychological needs, laddering 1. INTRODUCTION Interactive technology for children has received a growing amount of attention lately, and there is an increasing understanding of children’s needs and experiences related to many kinds of new technology. A multitude of research has focused, for example, on family communication [2], [9], tangible interaction devices [1], [12], and games [10], [13]. However, some important trends such as ubiquitous computing and smart environments have not yet received especially much attention in the context of designing and evaluating activities for children. For example, in environments such as museums and exhibition centers various interactive technology solutions are currently utilized with the aim of improving children’s experiences in those environments. Smart environments can differ from traditional environments for children’s technology (e.g schools and homes) in that the activities are typically more versatile and during a visit the user may be in interaction with many different systems in different contexts, which all affect the overall experience. Smart environments also set new demands on the methods, which are used in design and evaluation of the interactive technologies for children. Methods like “This or That” [11] studying pairwise preferences or “Again – Again” [6] studying willingness to use again are useful methods for simple comparative evaluations. However, evaluation of activities in dynamic ubiquitous environments also requires methods with a more holistic approach in understanding the user’s needs and experiences. Of the currently used methods, one potential method for that purpose is the laddering interview, a semi-structured interviewing technique based on the Means-End Chain model by Gutman [3] linking perceived product attributes to human values. Laddering has been used successfully to study the values of children aged five years and older [12], however, it has been found that especially young children cannot produce ladders all the way up to the value level and the final mapping between the children’s comments and values has to be carried out by the researcher(s). This leaves an opportunity to carry out the mapping on the highest level of abstraction using also other conceptual frameworks besides those, which model human values. A good candidate for a new laddering framework is the theory of psychological needs, the role of which has been recently emphasized in the field of user experience [4], [5]. Especially the framework of ten psychological needs and the accompanying questionnaire by Sheldon et al. [7] have been found useful in studies involving adults. The framework consists of three self- determination theory related needs – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – extended by seven other needs: self-actualization- meaning, physical thriving, pleasure-stimulation, money-luxury, security, self-esteem, and popularity-influence. Using this framework, psychological needs and the extent of their fulfillment have been found to be the major source of positive and negative user experiences with interactive technologies [4], [5]. The aim of the present study was to contribute to UX research by studying children’s psychological needs during an interactive exhibition activity called Backpack Tours. For this purpose, a novel mixed-methods approach was developed based on the ten psychological needs framework by Sheldon et al. [7]. The approach uses laddering interviews and a questionnaire developed specifically for studying children’s psychological needs based on this framework. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. Interaction Design and Children’13, June 24–27, 2013, New York City, New York, United States. Copyright © 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-1918-8…$15.00.