"It would be handy if it had pictures, if you can't read": young digital natives as mobile phone users

Mobile devices and communication have become ubiquitous in the west and people born to this millennium start interacting with this environment from early on. These digital natives' approach to the world and expectations of how it should operate may differ from that of the digital immigrants'. This creates a risk of a design conflict, where solutions developed by immigrants may fit poorly to the natives' way to do things. It is important to understand digital natives better in order to know what design principles hold true with them. We interviewed 6--7 year old Finnish girls, who had just started school and had gotten their first mobile phone, to understand what their experiences are on using mobile phones, what they think of mobile phone use, and how they use them. This paper reports our preliminary results and proposes possible new avenues for research of digital natives.

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