Design Guidelines for Parent-Child Joint Media Engagement

Joint media engagement (JME), in which multiple people co-engage in a media experience, is an important media-use phenomenon, particularly when parents participate in children’s engagement with learning technologies. To better understand and design for JME, HCI research has examined diverse forms of parent-child JME and proposed design guidelines to support productive JME in family contexts. However, these guidelines remain dispersed across the literature, and the lack of synthesis limits researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to design effective joint media experiences and technologies for families and beyond. Drawing on discrete JME design implications reported in HCI work on parent-child JME, we systematically develop 14 design guidelines clustered under four JME goals: supporting sustained individual engagement, supporting sustained co-engagement, supporting inclusive and ethical engagement, and promoting positive engagement outcomes. Each guideline is supported by a set of design strategies, situated in relevant media experiences and use contexts, as well as potential application tensions. Building on the synthesized guidelines, we further extend the conceptual framing of productive JME and reflect on the critical use of the developed guidelines.