SUStory: Usability Evaluation of Conversational Interfaces for Children with a Narrative on a Game Board
Shanshan Chen, Panos Markopoulos, Jun Hu · 2024
The increasing application of conversational agents as assistants and playmates for children brings about the need for evaluation methods tailored for children. The System Usability Scale (SUS) for kids is a well-established instrument for measuring subjective aspects of the usability for children. However, using the scale for children presents difficulties relating to children’s concentration and the biases observed when they respond to questionnaires. To make the questionnaire completion enjoyable for children and improve their engagement with the questionnaire, we rendered the adaptation of SUS for children in a game-board format. This paper motivates the presentation of the questionnaire in this way and discusses the use of this instrument in a case study with 35 children aged eight to twelve. We argue that this presentation helped engage with children and there was little evidence of extreme response bias. We conclude that this board format is a more appropriate way to present the SUS questionnaires to children in usability tests, which may also apply to different surveys including rating scales.