3IBook: a User Interface Metaphor for Children——Analysis,Design and Evaluation

An increasing number of children are becoming the users who employ computers for learning and entertainment with today's ubiquitous computing.The bottleneck of designing an interactive game for children is the design of suitable interface metaphors so that it can facilitate the children's understanding and exploration.In this paper,we argue that traditional interface metaphors built for office usage are not well fit into the perceptual and cognitive features of children,and propose a novel interface metaphor for children,named 3IBook,based on the paper cartoons.The major characteristics of the metaphor are interactivity,immersion,and imagination(3I's).We describe the design features of the metaphor from the perspectives of structure,operation and pragmatics,and illustrate the interactive model built on the 3IBook.We demonstrate the rationale and effectiveness of the proposed approach by evaluating the realization of an interactive game in terms of this metaphor.