Designing interface for girls: Looking at the ‘form’ and ‘content’ factors in a comic container

Lots of educational games and other leisure applications are developed for boys, or at least with boys in the designers´ minds. This is because girls are harder to engage and motivate than boys. Given a game, boys rush to beat the game. Girls? The challenges are bigger because of their characteristics of being more reserved, taking their own sweet time to explore. For the reasons, more than ever, girls´ preferences and needs are less addressed. This study examines girls´ preferences in terms of a user interface´s form and content. In terms of form, i. e. the physical appearance attributes such as layout, contrast, balance, screen objects and other associated display elements of the interface are examined. A sample content of girls´ type comic is used as the domain for analysis. The comic is given a persona name iCOMIC: Fatihah. The content was created based on 25 girls experience and their affective values. Their life stories were combined, mixed and recreated in an attempt to indirectly teach girls about moral, ethical and cultural knowledge. In this study we assume that the display´s characteristics are dominant in adding interest towards `learning´. Using 12 randomly selected girls of age 7 till 19 as our subjects, we studied their preferences towards the interface design using Cooper´s primary pesona design. The preferences are analysed and translated into the iCOMIC interface, as an implication of the study. The study found out that there are significant deviations from the HCI general rule in terms of a user interface´s form design for girls. With such interface, one of the most important HCI research agenda is addressed, i. e. to provide techniques for information understanding.