Teenagers - Not The Uber-Geeks We Think They Are?
A 2005 Study From Jakob Neilsen Ph.D. found that Teenagers Were Not The Uber-Geeks You Might Think They Are.
I wonder if anything has changed since?
From - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/teenagers.html
I wonder if anything has changed since?
Summary:Misconceptions About Teenagers Many people think teens are technowizards 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 in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. Teens' poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level. We did confirm that teens like cool-looking graphics and that they pay more attention to a website's visual appearance than adult users do. Still, 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. Teenagers 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. One surprising finding in this study: teenagers don't like tiny font sizes any more than adults do. We've often warned websites about using small text because of the negative implications for senior citizens -- and even people in their late 40s whose eyesight has begun to decline. 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:
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