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How Kids Use the Web
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox usability column details how kids use the web. Even if you don't design sites for kids, some of the results are very interesting. As you might expect, kids like sound and animation more than adults. They're also much more likely to click on ads ... but mostly because they don't realize that's what they are. And although there are some differences, the testing shows kids really aren't that different than adults, preferring consistent, simple and clear interaction. (And they hate slow load times, too!)"
Even though participants in our study were very young, they often had the greatest success using websites intended for adults. Sites such as Amazon and Yahoo! are committed to utter simplicity and compliance with Web design conventions, and have become so easy to use that they support little kids very well. In contrast, many of the children's sites had complex and convoluted interaction designs that stumped our test users. As one first-grade boy said, "The Internet is a lot of times BORING because you can't find anything when you go on to it."
Maybe it's time that we give kids full access, and create dumbed down portals to adults.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
I was under the impression that all kids spend 99% of their online time in chat rooms talking to 40-year old cops about sex! Did the TV lie to me? ;-)
I probably would've clicked on a banner that said "BREAK DOWN WALLS WITH YOUR PENIS!". Now I know better, but back then I probably would've thought to myself "oh.. so THAT'S what it's for!"
I first went online when I was 12 years old and I very quickly learned to steer clear of sites explicitly for kids. They were almost always nothing but some (usually poorly designed) graphics, some animated gifs, and a few sentences of actual content per page. Maybe I was just weird, but I wanted to get strait at the content, not look at dumb animated gifs.
Sites for kids. That's about as vague as "sites for adults" (as opposed to "adult sites," of course).
There are several problems with categorizing the design of kids' sites too generically, though I do believe they did a reasonable attempt judging from the summary.
It's important to note that these were elementary school children. A first grader at 6 years old will still be learning how to sit still in his seat, while a fifth grader will begin thinking about his first date. They only studied 55 children, which is not a huge amount.
The only thing we know about those 55 kids is that 2/3 were in the US and 1/3 were in Israel (how about Finland? Brazil? Korea? Why Israel?) Kids in lower socioeconomic strata often can't even read basic words until third grade.
Were the kids told to look for information? Were they asked how "fun" the sites were? Why were they on line in the first place? Doing any design study without clearly identifying motivations basically produces useless results. For information, I recall several years ago being fairly impressed with Encarta's UI, and many of the early electronic "books" on CD-ROM (back in 1993-4, before Microsoft co-opted the term). And for entertainment, I have observed little kids really enjoying the "minesweeping" style of interface.
Can sweeping conclusions be drawn from such a study? Probably. But designers should be very wary if anyone ever asks them to make a product for any age group without a hell of a lot deeper segmentation as well.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
Having worked with several "kids community" type content providers, I can say that you're exactly right about all-flash no-content, and it's that way on purpose. The phrase "kids community" is really an oxymoron, I guess; that's because when you try to build an online community for kids, you wind up with two significant problems:
/gasp/ don't tell the advertisers that) so sites and communities designed for kids usually see the worst of the worst come to play.
First, kids don't always mix well with other kids, especially when the ages vary. Open up a chat room (for example) intended for kids aged 8-10 and it quickly fills up with 11-12 year olds whose sole purpose is to disrupt the room, taunt and tease the younger kids, etc. Communities targeted at teens are even more messy, the majority of chat, forum postings or what have you will be nothing but vulgar debates about whether or not the East Coast PlAyAz have more guns than the West Coast RaPpAz. In a nutshell, intelligent kids aren't hanging out at kid sites (but
The second problem is the pervert issue. While I dare say it's not nearly the problem that everyone makes it out to be, it's a very real situation and it's something that needs to be either planned for or avoided as much as possible. Unfortunately, by opening up your "doors" to allow a "community" to grow, you have no real way of knowing who's who, what they're up to, or keeping the bad folks out. Again I'll assert that perverts are not lurking in every chat room, but you can't design a site for kids without addressing the issue somehow.
As most sites have learned, the easiest way to counter these problems is to make it impossible for them to occur. If you don't have a community (chat, forums) you don't get vulgar, hate-filled spewage between kids, there are no chatrooms to fill up with young Eminems practicing their four letter words. And if you don't have a community, there's no way for perverts to make contact with kids. Plus assuming you aren't collecting any info, just displaying cartoons, you don't have to worry about COPPA et al.
This is why a lot of "kid friendly" websites are nothing more than a bunch of big colors and goofy animations... Zero liability and much less effort to maintain.
Read this Jakob Nielsen (coauthor of this study) article to see why you only need 5 users to find 85% of usability problems and around 15 users to find 99.9% of all problems.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
So maybe they don't have 100% of the answers with this study, but it's still a valid study. (Unless you can assault the assertions made in the article about how many users are needed.)