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The paper reports a comparative assessment of 3 usability-testing methods (UTM) involving 45 children aged 8-14 as test-users. The 3 methods were concurrent think-aloud, interview and questionnaire. These 3 UTM 's require different levels of verbalisation from the children that were performing the evaluation. It was hypothesised that the age of the children, their gender, verbal competence and extroversion level would influence which method works best. The results of this study show that the think-aloud protocol helps identify most usability problems and suggests that girls thinking out loud report more usability problems than boys.

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The main argument against the use of drag-and-drop in software for young children is that it may be too difficult for them to maintain pressure on the mouse button during movement. The present research findings refuted this argument by showing that most errors made by children from Kindergarten 2 and Grade 1 and university students occur at the beginning and end of a move and not in between. The results also show that the number of errors are affected by receptor size and movement direction, but not by movement distance. Based on these results, design guidelines are formulated.