Touch to Read: Investigating the Readers’ Interaction Experience in Mediated Reading to Design Story Apps

A story app is a children’s digital book which takes advantage of the multimedia and multimodality resources of mobile interaction devices. However, the poorly design of the interactive areas (hotspots) in story apps can compromise the reading activity and children’s literacy acquisition. This is even more serious in mediated reading between children and parents, since the latter may not know how to use the hotspots or even feel that their presence is superfluous due to the digital resources. Outgoing from this scenario, we have carried out a user study with six parent-child dyads to investigate the effects of hotspots on the readers’ experience during mediated reading of three-story apps to identify design problems and opportunities. The study measured five aspects of the interaction with hotspots, namely: 1) understanding, locating and recognizing hotspots; 2) balanced versus unbalanced number of interactions; 3) reading flow versus reading difficulties during the interaction; 4) engagement versus distraction in reading caused by the interactions; 5) distance versus closeness in mediation. The analyses indicate that hotspots are usually not designed for mediated reading, which may lead to parents’ disengagement. Poorly located or misrepresented hotspots caused navigation errors negatively impacting reading. Contrary to findings reported by previous studies, we observed that the interactive game areas can provide a common point for intergenerational convergence stimulating mediated reading.