Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  How do I Find Blue Books About Dogs? The Errors and Frustrations of Young Digital Library Users (04 Oct 2005) The reasons for childrens’ preference for and better performance with browsing interfaces are related to their physical and cognitive development. While spelling and typing keywords are difficult for young children (Solomon, 1993; Borgman et al., 1995), before they can get to this stage, they face two other obstacles. First, they must have sufficient domain knowledge to come up with useful keywords (Moore & St. George, 1991). At this point, many children, not knowing how a keyword system works, will simply enter a full natural language query (Marchionini, 1989; Solomon, 1993; Schacter et al., 1998). For children who know they need to use keywords, the second step is to extract keywords from their query. Cognitively, this can be a difficult task for young children who don’t yet think abstractly (Spavold, 1990). Even for those children who do extract appropriate keywords, the search engine or digital library may use different indexing terminology, resulting in no hits. Finally, in systems where Boolean searches are allowed, children are often confused between the meaning of AND and OR (Marchionini, 1989). Article URL: http://hcil.cs.umd.edu/trs/2005-27/2005-27.pdf Read 68 more articles from University Of Maryland sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy