It's Hip To Be Square

Does that mean you should give up, and not bother with the whole problematic notion of aiming part of your Web site at teenagers? No--you need to build on the areas where we as librarians have undeniable cred: books, reading, and finding stuff that's hard to find. Here's my quick and dirty guide to doing just that.

I've been designing and maintaining various library teen Web sites, such as the Multnomah County Library Outernet (www.multnomah.lib.or.us/lib/outer/), since 1996. The dos and don'ts below are drawn from my experiences with those sites, what I know about the theories of good interface design, what I've heard from teens, and--yes--my pet peeves.

DON'T link to obvious sites.
"It's easy to find things on the Internet. Just type whatever you want and then dot com." I overheard a 12-year-old student suggest this search strategy to the boy next to her as I was doing an Internet training. Her certainty made me rethink what should and should not be included on a library teen Web site.

Listing obvious sites also makes even a carefully crafted site structure look cumbersome. Teens in a hurry to find pictures of the Backstreet Boys aren't going to go: 1. to the library site, 2. to the "for teens" section, 3. to the "music" section, and 4. to the link to--you guessed it--backstreetboys.com. So don't link to obvious sites such as wwf.com or backstreetboys.com that teens can find on their own, and in fewer clicks than your site structure allows.

DO include links to book review sites and a way for teens to post their own comments about what they're reading.
As an example, the Young Adult Library Services Association's Teen Hoopla directory(www.ala.org/teenhoopla/) features an ever-growing collection of book reviews written by teens. It also has a page of links to other book review sites, including the excellent Reading Rants by Jennifer Hubert(tln.lib.mi.us/~amutch/jen/) and Cathy Young's Favorite Teenage Angst Books(www.grouchy.com/angstbooks.html), among others. Many libraries also put up booklists on various subjects. In fact, why stop at books? Many of us circulate CDs, CD-ROMs, and videos--how about giving teens a chance to comment on music, games, and movies, too? For instance, the Ann Arbor (MI) District Library's Teen Page (www.aadl.org/referen/teen/YAABReviews.htm) has reviews of music as well as books.

All people, not just teens, like to feel that their opinions are valued, that what they think and feel about a topic matters. The developers of Web sites that feature "online communities" know this, and exploit it for their advertisers. You should exploit it, too.

DON'T create a page full of links to search engines unless you're going to add descriptions and information about them.
Many designers of school and library Web sites apparently think it is the height of cleverness to have a page full of links to search engines that includes giant logo graphics from each engine. I've seen this on more sites than I care to mention--even on sites that I otherwise respect, and it never fails to irritate me. Do they think teens won't recognize the letters Y-A-H-O-O without seeing them in the official font size and colors? Or that it won't occur to the teens to use some of the most popular and heavily advertised sites on the Web? DO act like a librarian. Link to search engines if you want, but "catalog" them if you do--provide a short description of what each engine is good for and advise the kids about the ads they're going to encounter when they use them.

Many teens (and many adults) have problems understanding the concept of links. They sometimes think that the only way to access a site is by clicking the link to it on whatever page they found the site linked on. They keep coming back to that page-o'-links-to-search-engines because they don't know that they can get to the search engines any other way. Unless you want, craftily, to artificially inflate the amount of traffic your site gets because of all those kids loading the search engines page, don't create this kind of page.

Some might argue that providing links with logos (but no descriptions) is helpful to novice users of the Internet--they'll see the logos and recognize the sites, and it will make their Web searching experience easier. I actually think it can confuse novice users even more.

DO think globally, but link locally.
You should assemble sites on topics that are more or less universally hot, but put a local spin on them. Make it worth your teens' while to use your site rather than a search engine by slanting your links toward local, lower-profile organizations that the teens may not ever otherwise encounter. Some examples: almost all library teen sites have some "college planning" links. But not many of them link, say, to the site from their state's department of education that describes the special scholarships available to residents, or the sites of community colleges in the region. Likewise, if your school requires students to do volunteer service, include links to local nonprofit organizations. In fact, do this regardless of whether or not your school requires volunteer service--many teens are interested in activism.

DON'T put too many links on any individual page.
It's overwhelming to scroll through screen after screen of text. But DON'T have fewer than a dozen links on a single page, either--it makes the site look wimpy and neglected.

DO update your site regularly.
A Web site is never done. To get new links for your site, make a regular practice of "link farming"--getting good links from other sites. The Internet Scout Report (www.scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/) is a great online source of information about new sites. Yahoo! Internet Life is a good print source. I often look at sites from other libraries--you can get to almost all of them from Suffolk County (NY) Library's Virtual YA Index (www.suffolk.lib.ny.us/youth/virtual.html).

For more new sites, include some kind of "Suggest a site" link on every page of your site, and you'll get ideas and URLs from your users. Also, page through the magazines in your teen collection--lots of Web site addresses show up in articles and advertisements. And pay attention to the sites that teens in your library are looking at when they're not doing schoolwork. Every so often, search for a popular teen topic using a different search engine than usual--since no search engine indexes the entire Web, and each engine's database is different, you will almost certainly find new sites.

DON'T put too many levels of hierarchy in your site.
To paraphrase an old Tootsie Pop commercial, how many clicks does it take to get to the teen center of your Web site? Can you get to the teen section directly from the library home page, or do you need to go through the children's or the "library departments" section to get to the teen section? And once you're in the teen center, how many sections and sub-sections do you have? If you have frequently found yourself muttering, "I know we link to that somewhere--now, what section was it in?" think about simplifying your site's hierarchical structure.

DO describe each section within your teen site as clearly as you can, but DON'T make the descriptions too long.
Few people have the patience to read a long annotation detailing all the features of a section. If you feel that your description doesn't begin to cover all the marvelous links to be found in the section, resort to the ever-popular "and more," as in: "College Planning: admissions, guides to schools, financial aid, study abroad, and more!" Use the same procedure when you're annotating individual sites within a section.

DON'T use the latest and greatest graphical and audio bells and whistles in an attempt to attract teens.
In a chapter I wrote for The Internet Public Library Handbook (Neal-Schuman, 1999) I advised: "Be as graphically sophisticated as you possibly can" and "Use bells and whistles, but use them judiciously." I'm no longer sure about the virtues of bells and whistles--all those glitzy Web animations and media files, many of which require users to install plug-in programs (Java, Javascripts, Shockwave, RealAudio, animated GIFs, et cetera). I'm not certain these are ever justified for sites meant to reach a wide audience that uses widely varying hardware, some of it very old, with various rates of connection to the Internet, some of them very slow. Never forget that some of your users are colorblind, some of them are blind, and some of them like to browse the Web with the images turned off. In short: if your graphical sophistication crashes Netscape 2.1 over a 14.4 modem, simplify it. If you're lucky enough to have a computer with lots of RAM and a speedy connection to the Net, I suggest that you visit the most poorly funded school in your area and try to load your site on the computers in their lab--if they have a lab.Now some of you may be saying, "But my teen advisory board wanted animated GIFs on every page!" Well...

DO involve teens in the design and maintenance of your site, but DON'T assume that by doing so you have captured the essence of all that is teenage.
News flash: Bright colors, animated GIFs, mouseovers, Shockwave, Flash, et cetera, do not necessarily equal instant and universal teen appeal. When you have a teen advisory board design your site, the look of the site will reflect the personal tastes of that particular group of teens. This isn't a bad thing, any more than it would be to get input from teachers about the design of a teacher resource site, but other teens may find the site hard to navigate, useless, or just plain goofy-looking.

Here's the bad news: If you do all the dos and avoid all the don'ts that I've outlined above, you're still not guaranteed a site that teenagers will like. On the other hand, you will have a fast-loading site with useful links to local content, ways for teens to comment on books, music, movies, and games, and without excessive structural hierarchy. And who knows? That might just turn out to be cool.