Rethinking the Design of Hotspots in Children’s Digital Picturebooks: Insights from an Exploratory Study

Finding the correct hotspots when interacting with digital picture-books is oft challenging for children. Here, we present an exploratory study car-ried out with a group of third graders to inform the design of hotspot icons for a children’s digital picturebook. Based on a selection and analysis of the most commonly used icons in digital picturebooks, especially apps, we created a low fidelity paper prototype to investigate children’s preferences and understanding of the interactive navigation areas, configuration and menus. For this, we invit-ed the children to draw new icons for each hotspot. Based on the analysis of the results we designed a proposal of icons that were implemented in a digital pro-totype for tablets. The prototype was then validated with a similar group of children, and the results provided valuable insights for the design of hotspots that can be useful for researchers and designers working and developing digital picturebooks for children.