Don't talk to strangers!: peer tutoring versus active intervention methodologies in interviewing children

Digital products designed for children should be validated by children. When it comes to usability testing, not all the available methods which work well with adults are equally applicable with child participants. In our study, we investigated two methods, Peer Tutoring which was developed for children, and Active Intervention which originates from the more traditional Think-Aloud methodology with adults. Our goal was to find out which of the two methods does elicit more comments by 8-10 years old boys when using a web application. The results showed that Peer Tutoring did elicit the greatest number of comments. At the same time the number of prompts provided by the test moderator was tendentially lower than during Active Intervention.