Today’s teenagers compose a good chunk of our prospective students and they can get bored very easily… even on the Web.
According to a study conducted by the Web usability guru, Jakob Nielsen, websites targeted to teens “must be simple — but not childish — and supply plenty of interactive features”.
Whether for school assignments, information about health issues they’re too embarrassed to talk about or product research for things they’d like to buy, teenagers go straight to the Web to find answers.
Nothing new under the digital sun, here.
Another finding of this study, however, tells another story.
When measuring “the proportion of times users were able to complete a representative and perfectly feasible task on the target site,” Nielsen found that the success rate of these teens was only 55% (compared to a 66% success rate for adults in another of his studies).
The main culprits of this weak performance were identified as teenagers’ poor reading skills, lower patience level and less sophisticated research skills (hey, they haven’t attended college yet).
This study also highlights the need for College websites to use shorter text copy and clearer navigation schemes.
If a teenager cannot find quickly the information s/he’s looking for on your website, s/he will probably just try to find it on another one.
