Climbing the Cool Wall: exploring teenage preferences of cool

Daniel Fitton, Matthew Horton, Janet C. Read, Linda Little, Nicola Toth

Research output: Contribution to conferencePosterpeer-review

Abstract

Cool is an essential characteristic when designing technologies that appeal to teenagers, but is very challenging to understand and design for. This paper describes a study that investigated cool with teenagers using a specially constructed ‘Cool Wall’ that allows items to be rated using a simple scale. We present the design of the Cool Wall prototype then the findings from two field studies in which it was used. The studies found that expensive mobile technologies were considered the most cool by teenagers participating in the studies, while items that are gender or age specific often divided opinion. This suggests that HCI practitioners wishing to ‘design for cool’ need to carefully understand the their user groups, also that the cool wall described in this paper is one low-cost tool for providing insights into this understanding.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Event30th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2012 - Austin, Texas, Austin, TX, United States
Duration: 5 May 201210 May 2012
http://chi2012.acm.org/program/desktop/Session232.html?searchterm=health+system

Conference

Conference30th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin, TX
Period5/05/1210/05/12
Internet address

Keywords

  • adolescent
  • aesthetics
  • reactions

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