Alt-Web Design: Usability of Websites for Teenagers

Excerpted from an article by: Jakob Nielsen

Sumary:

When using websites, teenagers have a lower success rate than adults and they're also easily bored. To work for teens, websites must be simple - but not childish - and supply plenty of interactive features.

It's almost cliché to say that teenagers live a wired lifestyle, but they do. Teens in this study reported using the Internet for:

School assignments
Hobbies or other special interests
Entertainment (including music and games)
News
Learning about health issues that they're too embarrassed to talk about
E-commerce

And, even when they don't make actual purchases online, teens use websites to do product research and to build gift wish-lists for the credit-card carrying adults in their lives.

Misconceptions about Teens

Many people think teens are techno-wizards who surf the Web with abandon. It's also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy,
blinking graphics.

Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent
for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users. (The success rate indicates the proportion of times users were able to complete a representative and perfectly feasible task on the target site. Thus,
anything less than 100 percent represents a design failure and lost
business for the site.)

Poor Teen Performance cause by three things:

insufficient reading skills,

less sophisticated research strategies,

dramatically lower patience level.

What do teens like?

Cool-looking graphics and they pay more attention to a website's visual appearance than adult users do.

The sites that our teen users rated the highest for subjective satisfaction were sites with a relatively modest, clean design. They typically marked down overly glitzy sites as too difficult to use. Teenagers like to do stuff on the Web, and dislike sites that are slow or that look fancy but behave clumsily.

No Boring Sites

Teens frequently complained about sites that they found boring. Being boring is the kiss of death in terms of keeping teens on your site. That's one stereotype our study confirmed: teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That's also why they leave sites that
are difficult to figure out.

Teens don't like to read a lot on the web

They get enough of that at school. Also, the reading skills of many teenagers are not what one might hope for, especially among younger teens. Sites that were easy to scan or that illustrated concepts visually were strongly preferred to sites with dense text.

Teens don't like tiny font sizes

We have always assumed that tiny text is predominant on the Web because most Web designers are young and still have perfect vision, so we didn't expect to find issues with font sizes when testing even younger users.

However, small type often caused problems or provoked negative comments from the teen users in our study. Even though most teens are sufficiently sharp-eyed, they move too quickly and are too easily distracted to attend to small text.

What's good?

The following interactive features all worked well because they let teens do things rather than simply sit and read:

Online quizzes
Forms for providing feedback or asking questions
Online voting
Games
Features for sharing pictures or stories
Message boards
Forums for offering and receiving advice
Features for creating a website or otherwise adding content

These interactive features allow teenagers to make their mark on the Internet and express themselves in various ways -- some small, some big.

Differences between age groups

Some websites in our study tried to serve both children and teens in a single area, usually titled something like Kids. This is a grave mistake; the word "kid" is a teen repellent. Teenagers are fiercely proud of their newly won status and they don't want overly childish content (one more reason to ease up on the heavy animations and gory color schemes that actually work for younger audiences). We recommend having separate sections for young children

and teens, labeling them Kids and Teens, respectively.

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