Let Kids Wonder, Question and Make Mistakes: How the Designers of Children's Technology Think about Child Well-being

Abstract

To gain deeper insight into how the creators of children's technology operationalize child well-being, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 industry professionals who create child-centered interactive technologies, including platforms, content, and policies. Interviewees' descriptions of well-being clustered into four hierarchical categories, focusing on creating experiences that were: 1) safe, 2) usable, 3) educational, and 4) meaningful. We found that organizational culture influenced designers' self-reported ability to create child-centered products, and companies with a culture that explicitly prioritized child well-being and drew on input from experts were able to scaffold even novice employees in attending to child users' developmental needs. Finally, we found that companies struggled to define product metrics that reflected the full continuum of child well-being and often fell back on simplistic measures like engagement and download counts. We contribute a framework outlining current industry conceptualizations of designing for child well-being, with the depth of well-being support mapped to one axis and respect for children's agency mapped to the other.