Teens Are Tech Wizards? Not!

New study debunks stereotype of teens as tech experts

By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2005

If you think most teens are Web wizards, think again. Teenagers are easily bored and frustrated by the Web, and less successful with their online searches than adults, according to a recent study by the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) (www.nngroup.com), a user-experience research firm.

In NNG's report "Teenagers on the Web: Usability Guidelines for Creating Compelling Websites," researchers Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger debunk the stereotype of teens as savvy Web experts who can surf circles around their parents. Adolescents are actually much more apprehensive about online technology than we think. Moreover, youth have clear ideas about what they like about Web sites—and what they don't. And that's worth a site designer's attention.

Whatever you do, don't treat them like kids, says Loranger. Too often, sites try to serve both young children and teens in a single area, which is "a big turnoff," she says, as are childish colors or icons. And while young adults place a greater value on a site's appearance than do adults, they don't go for glitzy, blinking graphics. Instead, teens prefer clean, modest—but still cool—designs.

The study, which involved 38 boys and girls ages 13 to 17 primarily from the U.S. and also Australia, is the first to observe teenagers using a variety of sites, according to NNG. The subjects were given specific tasks that involved navigating 23 sites—everything from government and library Web pages to commercial sites. Loranger says the researchers were "astounded" to find that teens achieved a success rate of 55 percent on Web tasks compared to 66 percent for adults in a previous Nielsen study.

Why did teens perform so poorly? Insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research skills, and a dramatically lower patience level, states the report. Young people also have difficulty wading through and making sense of a lot of complex information. So, Loranger says media specialists and other educators can play an important role in guiding teens online, as well as creating content that doesn't overwhelm them with technical terms and dense blocks of text.

As for teens being tech-savvy, many study participants didn't understand the concept of bandwidth, for example, or were unsure about how to download plug-ins. And while they liked cool graphics and multimedia presentations, their home and school computers were often too outdated to support these features.

Above all, teens abhor a boring site—it's the kiss of death to youth, who decide within a matter of seconds whether to stay or leave a site. How to keep their interest? By emphasizing interactive elements that allow teens to make their mark on the Internet, the report says. Online quizzes and voting and message boards work well "because they let teens do things rather than simply sit and read," says Loranger.

One surprising finding in the study—teenagers don't like tiny font sizes any more than adults do. Despite their presumably keen vision, teens are too easily distracted to attend to small text.

The complete 128-page report can be downloaded for $129 on the NNG Web site.

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