OBB: GenAI for children, Germany, India, Brazil, Japan

Our client was motivated to find out how young technology users interact with AI-driven learning and social tools. We were asked to recruit children aged 6-8 years, tweens aged 9-12 years, and teens aged 13-17 years, to explore how each group interacts with Generative AI. With the help of their parents where necessary, each age group was invited to share feedback on a different collection of GenAI tools through an online bulletin board (OBB) over a period of 6 weeks.

Parents were required to subscribe to various apps so that app usability and functionality could be tested by their children. The OBB was designed to find out about how engaging the children found each tool and what in particular they liked or disliked about it. The research was to be focused on 4 different markets, each situated on a different continent, including Germany, India, Brazil, and Japan.

The FieldworkHub team recruited all three age groups in each of the four markets and obtained parental consent for their participation and the commitment of the parents to support the study. Participants tested AI-powered apps tailored for each age group including ChatGPT, Quizlet, Bing Image Creator and Snapchat My AI. Participants documented their experiences through videos, photos, and detailed written feedback.

As this was a long-running study (4.5 hours of activities over six weeks), our team needed to encourage participants to remain engaged with the research. We provided dedicated moderator support in local languages, to help ensure that each participant uploaded high-quality responses and completed all of the online activities. Participants from different countries offered insight into cultural nuances (for example, the extent to which parents let their children use the internet on their own) and insightful responses on what they liked and disliked about each app.

We paid out the incentives in stages to encourage the parents and children, and reimbursed them for the cost of any subscriptions that they needed to purchase. When the research in each country was concluded, we obtained a written report from the local moderator which we reviewed for quality and consistency.

Our proactive approach led to high completion rates and delivery of high-quality, actionable insights for our client. The variety of in-depth feedback enabled our client to refine their market approach and improve the learning potential of their own products.