User Requirements for Accessible Digital Pretend Play Interventions for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, a Human Centred Design Approach

Pretend play is a stage in early childhood development where children learn and develop language and social skills through acting out imaginary sce-narios. Pretend play skills are typically delayed for children with Autism Spec-trum Disorders (ASD). Digital technology has been successfully used to engage children with ASD in pretend play, however research around the needs and re-quirements of the user is often omitted in these designs. Human Centered Design (HCD) provides a way of including these needs and making interventions suita-bly accessible to the target user. This paper presents the results of a multi-stage HCD process including observations, interviews and a Delphi study, using both the primary group (children with ASD) and their proxies (those who work closely with the group). The final result is a set of User Requirements which emerged from the data in the HCD stages. The User Requirements and guidelines pre-sented provide researchers with a tool for developing digital pretend play inter-ventions for children with ASD. Future research could benefit by incorporating the User Requirements when designing digital pretend play interventions, which is a small but growing area of research.