Understanding Cool in Computing for African-American Youth

This paper examines challenges and opportunities in designing for “cool” as a goal for user interface design for African American youth. The categories of cool as a design metric were adopted from the definition from Read et al. (2011), including categories highlighted by terms like rebellious, anti-social, retro, authentic, rich, and innovative. We present initial results from discussions with designers who created interfaces for African-American youth, highlighting the cool categories but also exploring terms unique to the target population. We speculate on how “cool” could be used as a critical parameter in user interface design processes. Author