Children's and adults' schemes in categorization of basic objects and mobile applications

Abstract

Diversity of users has become recent design concerns, and children are one of those user groups. Organization of contents is one of research areas in designing for children. Research suggests differences in abilities between adults and children; for instance, attention, logic and memory skills, and linguistic abilities. This is related to the way children navigate and access information. Efficient system organization must correspond with user's categorization scheme. Prior study suggests differences in the way children categorized objects than the predetermined categories; however, it did not provide a comparison between children and adults in the way they generated the categories. Moreover, influence of expertise on categorization schemes has been highlighted in psychological literature. Primary objective of this study was to investigate how children and adults utilize categorization schemes based on their domain expertise. This study was carried out under two different circumstances: 1) when the objects were concrete and both age groups were domain experts, and 2) when objects were more abstract and both age groups could be either novices or experts. Similarity and differences between adults and children were found. The results of both tasks showed indicated that categorization schemes employed by participants depends on the information they were exposed to.