Usability Testing with Children: Comparing Think-Aloud and Constructive Interaction

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 thinkaloud 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 dyads. Our results show that the pairing of 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.