Designing a Guided Authoring Interface for Parents Creating Personalized Social-Emotional Learning Storybooks for Children

Abstract

Although previous studies have demonstrated the developmental benefits of personalized storybooks, relatively little attention has been paid to the personalization approaches and authoring formats preferred by parents. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews and hands-on activities with 12 parents of children aged 3–5 and three storybook experts to identify design requirements for personalized social-emotional learning （SEL） storybook creation. Based on these findings, we developed SELf-Storybook, a guided AI-based system that supports parents in authoring personalized SEL storybooks. We further evaluated the system through a within-subject study involving 12 parents. The results showed that SELf-Storybook achieved performance comparable to the Baseline system in terms of SEL relevance, perceived personalization, creativity support, and overall user experience. However, qualitative feedback and several quantitative findings suggested that the guided and structured interface more faithfully and consistently reflected children’s physical characteristics in the generated outputs. These findings highlight the trade-off between structured guided interfaces and prompt-based unstructured approaches, while offering design implications for future parent-centered AI storybook authoring systems.