Engage!
Co-designing Search Engine Result Pages to Foster Interactions
Garrett Allen (Boise State University)
Benjamin L. Peterson (Boise State University)
Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda (Boise State University)
Mostofa Najmus Sakib (Boise State University)
Jerry Alan Fails (Boise State University)
Casey Kennington (Boise State University)
Katherine Landau Wright (Boise State University)
Maria Soledad Pera (Boise State University)
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Abstract
In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children's engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session to enable us to elicit children's preferences and determine what children (ages 6-12) find lacking in more traditional SERP. We learned that children want more dynamic means of navigating results and additional ways to interact with results via icons. We use these findings to inform the design of a new SERP interface, which we denoted CHIRP. To gauge the type of engagement that a SERP incorporating interactive elements-CHIRP-can foster among children, we conducted a user study at a public school. Analysis of children's interactions with CHIRP, in addition to responses to a post-task survey, reveals that adding additional interaction points results in a SERP interface that children prefer, but one that does not necessarily change engagement levels through clicks or time spent on SERP.