A comparison of think-aloud and post-task interview for usability testing with children

Abstract

We describe an experimental study of different strategies for obtaining verbalization data, when conducting a usability test with children. Two software products were evaluated by 25 children of ages 9-11, at their school, using think aloud and post-task interviews. We have found confirmatory evidence, in support of earlier tentative results, that children reported more usability problems with think aloud rather than with post-task interviews and girls reported more problems than boys. However, when we counted also the usability problems identified through observation, we found no significant difference between the two methods or between the two genders.