Teens and the Internet
Re: Neilsen, Jakob, Usability of Websites for Teenagers. useit.com, January 31, 2005.
The above reading reviewed studies conducted to evaluate how teens utilize the internet. The studies found that teens like easy to use, good looking, fast paced web sites. Teens who visit web sites prefer to see cool visuals rather than a lot of text. Teens use the web site for a large array of tasks, such as homework, e-commerce or just to surf the web. Regardless, the studies conclude that teens lose patience easily and demand user friendly web sites.
I found the studies to be interesting because it concurs with my initial thoughts on how and why teens go online. If you look at a lot of the teen web sites they are flashy, easy to navigate and contain a lot of eye catching graphics. Just like producing a TV commercial with teens being the main audience, a web site has to catch and maintain the attention of teens who are already use to the fast paced technological lifestyle they have ground up around.
Garnering teen participation in a web site is a true test for many political web sites that are trying to gain more teen or young adult influence at the polls.
3 Comments:
Great post... but I wasn't quite as impressed with Neilsen's article.
I think the article is in the "Thank you Captain Obvious" column. Of course teens are more likely to use websites that are (as you put it) "easy to use, good looking and fast paced". Do you know any age group or subculture that would prefer a confusing, ugly and slow website?
I think Neilsen's study has terrible validity - in that it doesn't measure what it claims to be measuring....
Teen's also like to communicate. They like anything where they can talk to friends, like IM, or write posts they think other people will read, or read about things that people like them or their friends write, and spend most of their time online doing that - whereas the generation above us, our parents, seem mostly to use the Internet for getting information, not so much for communicating, outside of email. A generalization, of course.
I agree with dem4lyf. Neilsen's study has terrible vaildity. The sample he used isn't even representative of teens. The teens he used in the study spend less time online than the average teen. See my post for more details on this.
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