Prior work shows that setting limits on young children's screen time is conducive to healthy development but can be a challenge for families. We investigate children's (age 1 - 5) transitions to and from screen-based activities to understand the boundaries families have set and their experiences living within them. We report on interviews with 27 parents and a diary study with a separate 28 families examining these transitions. These families turn on screens primarily to facilitate parents' independent activities. Parents feel this is appropriate but self-audit and express hesitation, as they feel they are benefiting from an activity that can be detrimental to their child's well-being. We found that families turn off screens when parents are ready to give their child their full attention and technology presents a natural stopping point. Transitioning away from screens is often painful, and predictive factors determine the pain of a transition. Technology-mediated transitions are significantly more successful than parent-mediated transitions, suggesting that the design community has the power to make this experience better for parents and children by creating technologies that facilitate boundary-setting and respect families' self-defined limits.

Computing systems that place a high level of burden on their users can have a negative affect on initial adoption, retention, and overall user experience. Through an iterative process, we have developed a model for user burden that consists of six constructs: 1) difficulty of use, 2) physical, 3) time and social, 4) mental and emotional, 5) privacy, and 6) financial. If researchers and practitioners can have an understanding of the overall level of burden systems may be having on the user, they can have a better sense of whether and where to target future design efforts that can reduce those burdens. To help assist with understanding and measuring user burden, we have also developed and validated a measure of user burden in computing systems called the User Burden Scale (UBS), which is a 20-item scale with 6 individual sub-scales representing each construct. This paper presents the process we followed to develop and validate this scale for use in evaluating user burden in computing systems. Results indicate that the User Burden Scale has good overall inter-item reliability, convergent validity with similar scales, and concurrent validity when compared to systems abandoned vs. those still in use.

Though toddlers and preschoolers are regular touchscreen users, relatively little is known about how they learn to perform unfamiliar gestures. In this paper we assess the responses of 34 children, aged 2 to 5, to the most common in-app prompting techniques for eliciting specific gestures. By reviewing 100 touchscreen apps for preschoolers, we determined the types of prompts that children are likely to encounter. We then evaluated their relative effectiveness in teaching children to perform simple gestures. We found that children under 3 were only able to interpret instructions when they came from an adult model, but that children made rapid gains between age 3 and 3-and-a-half, at which point they were able to follow in-app audio instructions and on-screen demonstrations. The common technique of using visual state changes to prompt gestures was ineffective across this age range. Given that prior work in this space has primarily focused on children's fine motor control, our findings point to a need for increased attention to the design of prompts that accommodate children's cognitive development as well.

Child development research suggests that using phones while caring for children can be problematic, but limited prior work in this space makes defining appropriate use challenging. We conducted the first exploration of whether adults feel pressure to limit phone use in this context and whether they choose to do so. Through mixed methods, we collected data from 466 adult caregivers at playgrounds. We found that phone use was a small part of playground time, yet a notable source of guilt. Adults engaged in systematic and specific phone-use and phone-non-use behaviors in order to prioritize their children above themselves. Our results indicate that caregiver values and self-control together predict behavior and can be used to model phone use in this context. Users' mixed success with engaging in intentional periods of non-use suggests that a design agenda which prioritizes cycles of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement may be of value to this group.

The tracking of developmental milestones in young children is an important public health goal for ensuring early detection and treatment for developmental delay. While numerous paper-based and web-based solutions are available for tracking milestones, many busy parents often forget to enter information on a regular basis. To help address this need, we have developed an interactive system called @BabySteps for allowing parents who use Twitter to track and respond to tweets about developmental milestones using a special hashtag syntax. Parent responses are parsed automatically and written into a central database that can be accessed via the web. We deployed @BabySteps with 14 parents over a 3-week period and found that parents were able to learn how to use the system to track their children's progress, with some using it to communicate with other parents. The study helped to identify a number of ways to improve the approach, including simplifying the hashtag syntax, allowing for private responses via direct messaging, and improving the social component. We provide a discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for the design of interactive public health systems.