Children as Architects of Web Directories: An Exploratory Study Judit Bar-Ilan and Yifat Belous Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 52900, Israel. E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Children are increasingly using the Web. Cognitive the- a wide range of difficulties while searching for information ory tells us that directory structures are especially on the Web. Existing Web search tools for children such suited for information retrieval by children; however, em- as Yahooligans! (http://www.yahooligans.com), KidsClick pirical results show that they prefer keyword searching. One of the reasons for these findings could be that the (http://kidsclick.org), and Ask Jeeves for Kids (http://www. directory structures and terminology are created by ajkids.com) do not contribute to children’s success in their grown-ups. Using a card-sorting method and an en- information tasks. In fact, it has been found that these tools veloping system, we simulated the structure of a direc- often cause a search failure due to their lack of special fea- tory. Our goal was to try to understand what browsable, tures essential for their young audience (Bilal, 1999, 2000, hierarchical subject categories children create when suggested terms are supplied and they are free to add or 2001, 2002a, Bilal & Watson, 1998; Large, Beheshti, & delete terms. Twelve groups of four children each (fourth Rahman, 2002). One possible explanation for this lack of and fifth graders) participated in our exploratory study. suitability to children’s needs can be the fact that search The initial terminology presented to the children was tools for children are mostly designed by adults, who do not based on names of categories used in popular directo- actively include the target audience in the design process ries, in the sections on Arts, Television, Music, Cinema, and Celebrities.