Exploring Verbalization and Collaboration of Constructive Interaction with Children

Abstract. Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test sub-jects collaborate in pairs 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 usability testing with children. However, the relationship between think-aloud and constructive interaction is still poorly understood. We present an experiment that compares think-aloud and constructive interaction. The experiment involves 60 children with three setups where children apply think-aloud or constructive interaction in ac-quainted and non-acquainted pairs. Our results show that the pairing of children had impact on how the children collaborated in pairs and how they would af-terward assess the testing sessions. In some cases, we found that acquainted dy-ads would perform well as they would more naturally interact and collaborate while in other cases they would have problems in controlling the evaluations.