JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

User involvement is widely accepted as key for designing effective applied games for health. This especially holds for children and young people as target audiences, whose abilities, needs, and preferences can diverge significantly from those of adult designers and players. Nevertheless, there is little shared know-how about how concretely children and young people have been involved in the design of applied games, let alone consensus guidance on how to do so effectively.

Objective:

The aim of this scoping review is to describe (1) what user involvement methods have been employed in the design of applied games with children and young people, (2) how these methods were implemented and (3) in what roles children and young people were involved, and (4) what factors impacted their involvement.

Methods:

We conducted a systematic literature search and selection across the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science, using the StART software for screening, selection and data extraction. We then ran a qualitative content analysis on extracted data using NVivo.

Results:

We retrieved 1,085 records, of which 47 met our eligibility criteria. Chief involvement methods were participatory design (43%) and co-design (37%), spanning a wide range of 45 concrete activities, with paper prototyping, group discussions, and playtesting the most frequent. In only half of the studies, children and young people participated as true design partners. Our qualitative content analysis suggested five factors impacting their successful involvement: comprehension, cohesion, confidence, accessibility, and time constraints.

Conclusions:

Co-design, participatory design, and similar high-level labels currently used in the field gloss over very uneven degrees of participation in design and a wide variety of implementations which greatly impact actual user involvement. The field would benefit from more careful consideration and documentation of the how of user involvement. Future research should explore what concrete activities and configurations can address common challenges of involving children and young people, such as comprehension, cohesion, confidence, and accessibility.