The prototype developed by this research was designed for children searching virtual spaces, and can bring together the study of human interest in an interface and information classification and retrieval. It can also be seen as a new method of testing the patterns associated with children’s information-seeking behaviors.
The results can be useful to those trying to make learning software more inviting.
The research results can be employed to construct a suitable virtual digital library interface for children.
Suggestions for further research are as follows.
The special ability of every child is different. Future digital library interfaces might provide different virtual space features for children to choose from. The individual user’s history of search behavior was not considered. Qualitative data and experiential analysis would allow us to gain a more in depth understanding of search behavior.
It may also help us to better understand the way children use digital resources and develop our understanding of their information-seeking behavior when using virtual interfaces.
Further understanding would make it possible to construct an interface to meet their needs. All three tasks in this experiment only required the child to choose one icon from the existing documents; therefore, the children didn’t necessarily follow the sequence of information.
It may be that this caused poorer performance when they were using the 3D-route interface. As a result, further work is needed for appropriate task design.