Usability4Children

UKids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (Alertbox April 2002)

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Alertbox

April 2002 Usability for Children

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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 14, 2002:

Kids' Corner: Website Usability for
Children
Summary:
Our usability study of kids found that they are as easily stumped by
confusing websites as adults. Unlike adults, however, kids tend toview
ads as content, and click accordingly. They also like colorful designs, but
demand simple text and navigation.
Millions of children already use the Internet, and millions more are coming online
each year. Many websites specifically target children with educational or
entertainment content, and even mainstream websites are adding "kids' corner"
sections for children -- either as a publicservice or to build brand loyalty from an
early age.
Despite this growth in users and services, very little is known about how children
actually use websites or how to design sites that will be easy for them to use. Most
website designs for kids are based on pure folklore about how kids
supposedly behave -- or, at best, by insights gleaned when designers observe
their own children, who arehardly representative of average kids, typical Internet
skills, or common knowledge about the Web.

Testing Children's Web Use
To find out how kids really use the Web, we conducted usability studies with 55
children who varied in age from 6 to 12 (first through fifth graders). We tested 39
kids in the United States and 16 in Israel, to broaden the international applicability
of ourrecommendations. (See also our separate study of teenage users, aged 1317.)
We observed the children interacting with 24 sites designed for children, and three
mainstream sites designed for adults (Amazon, Yahoo!, and Weather.com). For the
targeted sites, we tested some sites specifically devoted to children, such as Alfy,
MaMaMedia, and Sesame Street, and several kid-oriented subsites produced bymainstream companies, such as ABC News for Kids and Belmont Bank's Kids'
Corner.
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 veryhttp://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020414.html

7/4/2006

Kids' Corner: Website Usability for Children (Alertbox April 2002)

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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."

UsabilityProblems Hurt Kids
The idea that children are masters of technology and can defeat any computerrelated difficulty is a myth. Our study found that children are incapable of
overcoming many usability problems. Also, poor usability, combined with kids'
lack of patience in the face of complexity, resulted in many simply leaving
websites. A fourth-grader said, "When I don’t know what to do on a Webpage, I
just go look for something else."
Also, children don't like slow downloads any more than adults do. As one firstgrade girl said, "Make it go faster! Maybe if I click it, it will go faster..."
Young children often have hand-me-down computers, whether at home (where
they often inherit older machines when their parents upgrade) or at school (where
budget constraints mandate keepingmachines in service for many years). Kids
also typically have slow connections and outdated software. Given these
limitations, websites must avoid technical problems or crashes related to access
by low-end equipment. Faced with an error message, kids in our study told us that
they see them a lot, and that the best thing to do is to ignore them or close the
window and find something else to do....