Practical worth of Interfaces

The aim of this section is to identify how valuable parents find the interfaces offered for collaboration, in terms of how well these could serve without further elaboration to support parental tasks.

As part of our overall observations we would note that parents appear to have their own preferences with regard to the interfaces used by the system to report collaboration, i.e. the space and events interfaces. These preferences seem to be based on two aspects: activity representation and the ability to upload the room‘s picture. With regard to the context-activity representation in general it seems that

parents prefer visual resources rather than plain text, which appears to be the main reason for the positive response to the space interface.

To start our discussion about why, or in which context(s), these interfaces might be

considered useful we present two questions used to explore parents‘ views.

Considering only the two main interfaces, space and events, which of them

do you consider more useful in terms of information it offers to support you

with the monitoring of the child‘s activities?

Parent (3.10y) – “the space interface gives you a dynamic panorama of what is occurring within the room; the probable useful thing from the events interface is that there you can see a list of the events history, which you could use to select a particular event and revise what was happening on that moment.”

Parent (2.4y) – “the space interface is more representative to the activity occurring

within the room”…“events interface is not practical at all.”

Parent (0.6y) – “I cannot see myself using the events interface too much, it is quite

abstract”…“the space interface is more useful”…“it seats the game of where

everything is in the real room.”

These views of the space and events interfaces identify some of the features that parents might consider worthwhile if the PChCT is used in the monitoring of

children‘s activities. On the one hand, the layout of the image used in the background

of the space interface seems to be an important element in engendering positive attitudes to the space interface. We used the following question to explore about this perception:

Does the room layout, used at the background of the room-view interface,

help you with the spatial identification of activity?

Parent (3.10y) – “you can immediately see the hazardous area or point.” Parent (2.4y) – “Yes, I think I can identify activity from the room‟s layout.”

Parent (0.6y) – “especially if you know the room… don‟t know whether it may be easy to label to where they are… but I suppose it‟s your lounge, you would know anyway.”

For parent 0.6y‘s experience we used the room layout that belonged to the parent who participated in the activity-monitoring session and, therefore we find some hesitation about whether the parent‘s room layout is or is not in the background of the space interface. Despite this, parent 0.6y seems to agree that the room layout in the background might be considered part of the useful features of the space interface.

On the other hand, the events interface seems not to be informative enough, or it is difficult to associate with what is actually occurring within the room in which the child is active.

We additionally asked parents to assess numerically these interfaces (table 7-2):

Using a 1 to 5 scale, being 5 the highest, what is your score for each of these

interfaces?

Parent Child‘s age Space interface Events interface

ML 0.6 year 4 2

RB 2.4 year 5 3

YM 3.10 year 5 3

Table 7-2 Parents’ assessment of the space and event interfaces

At first glance we observe that table 7-2 shows how the three parents assign different levels of usefulness to the space and events interfaces.

An additional observation of interest from both the hands-on session and the interview is the association between the interfaces‘ perceived value and the access to the picture of the room. For instance, in our direct observations we see that, once parents received a report from the system, their first impulse was normally to upload

the room‘s picture followed by, for example, whispering ―right, there you are‖. From

the interviews, parents appear to consider the availability of the room‘s picture to be an important and worthwhile element of the interfaces.

Parent (3.10y) – “when using the interfaces I need to touch twice the display or to

Parent (2.4y) – “the offering to retrieve the room‟s image within any interface is I think the best of all.”

Parent (0.6y) – “I like the way you can click on it and you can actually see… the visual, natural image of the room.”

From the above responses we observe that there seems to be an overall acceptance of the space interface and a less positive attitude to the events interface. This initial exploration suggests issues in the quality of the presentation mechanisms used to communicate activity. The next section therefore explores parents‘ perceptions of presentation mechanisms used within these interfaces to inform them about the

child‘s activities.