A Preliminary Study of Interactivity on Visual Narrative in Children's Story Apps

This study discusses how visual narrative in children's electronic books can benefit from research findings on children's literature. In this paper we discuss the concept of interactivity in the context of ebooks as a resource that adds multimodal stimulus to visual narratives. Based on the work from Nikolajeva and Scott, we focus on three aspects to guide the design of interactive digital narratives for children: (1) ambiance, (2) representation of the characters and (3) the perspective of the narrative. The discussion is exemplified through the analysis of highly interactive children's ebooks, such as story apps. The results of this investigation aim at providing professionals with some preliminary guidelines that can helping them to design interactive books for children.