Child-based personas: need, ability and experience

Interactive technologies are becoming ubiquitous in many children's lives. From school to home, technologies are changing the way children live. However, current methods of designing these technologies do not adequately consider children's needs and developmental abilities. This paper describes and illustrates a new approach for creating user abstractions of children called the child-persona technique. Child-personas integrate theoretical concepts, empirically generated data and experiential goals. An analysis of the utility of this technique provides insights about how this technique can benefit designers by generating realistic child-user abstractions through a process which supports designers in child-centric design.