evaluatingdesign.com

I was reading an article about a recent survey on kids and usability which reported an interesting finding: According a survey by Microsoft and Viacom about kids and technology, children in developed countries don’t “like” technology, (though they do use it). Interestingly, children in Brazil, India, and China are much more likely to report “liking” the technology they use.

This has been interpreted as reflecting the integration of children and technology; a kind of merging of the concept with children’s lives so that one is not discernable from the other. This is borne out in the article by Andrew Davidson:

“Young people don’t see “tech” as a separate entity - it’s an organic part of their lives,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV’s VBS International Insight unit.

There is a danger here of interpreting the null. In statistics, we often set up a null hypothesis (for example, “Children don’t like technology” could be our null hypothesis). Assuming we have used the correct measurements for our construct, we can evaluated whether there is a significant difference from the null hypothesis to argue that children actually “like” technology.

If our null is not disproved, however, we can not immediately jump to say that the null is true (or for our example, that children don’t like technology). We can only say that the opposite of the null is not true (i.e., Children do not appear to “like” technology). The reason why the null is disproved could be many; it could be they didn’t collect enough data (likely not true for the MTV survey), or that the measure was not sensitive enough to pick up on what kids really like.

This last item crystallizes a real challenge within the usability community: as perceptions of technology change, how do we continue to create survey measures that accurately assess aspects of user’s perception? Will terms like “ease of use” develop new meaning? Or, more to the point of the study above, what will “like” mean? As perception changes, so do the effectiveness of terms that can be used to measure user experience.

Without the data (which we’re not going to get), it’s hard to say how the survey came to the conclusion that kids don’t “like” technology. But this report does bring up the question of how the term technology was defined. Even if technology is perceived as a tool to be used, it could still be something that users like (I imagine there are plenty of people who like their Black and Decker tools, or those who like their iPod). If technology was defined as an abstract term, however, it may have been that it lacked the face validity necessary for kids to understand what the survey was attempting to measure.

More on this as more information comes to bear. What I’d really like to see along with this results, however, is exactly how technology was defined and presented to their user group.

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