Comparison of think-aloud and constructive interaction in usability testing with children

Abstract

Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test subjects collaborate to solve tasks. Since children may face difficulties in following instructions for a standard think-aloud test, constructive interaction has been suggested as evaluation method when conducting usability testing with children. However, the relationship between think-aloud and constructive interaction is still poorly understood.We present an experiment that compares think-aloud and constructive interaction in usability testing. The experiment involves 60 children with three setups where children apply think-aloud, and constructive interaction in acquainted and non-acquainted pairs. Our results showed only minor significant differences between the setups, but the pairing of the children had impact on identification of usability problems as acquainted dyads identified more problems both in total and of the most severe than non-acquainted dyads and individual testers. Finally, the acquainted pairs reported that they had to put less effort into the testing than the think-aloud and non-acquainted children.