The Secret of their Success

Shortly after arriving at PBS KIDS, in 1999, I helped the producers of Barney create a new home page for their Web site. We came up with a design that was great fun. It featured a bright, impossible-to-ignore “Games” button, a crayon to highlight the coloring pages, and a giant photo of the star of the show. Perfect, we thought.

A few weeks later, at a usability testing session at a nearby school, several kids couldn’t wait to try our redesigned site. Since children are always talking about how much they like to play video games, we expected our young surfers to head straight for the “Games” button. Were we ever wrong. Without exception, every child immediately clicked on the picture of the big purple dinosaur. Unfortunately, the image of Barney wasn’t linked to anything—it was simply there for decoration and brand recognition. Instead of loving our new “improved” site, most of the kids thought it was broken!

That experience was a big wake-up call for me and the rest of our PBS KIDS Interactive team—the group that designs the PBS KIDS portal sites, works with the producers of sites for Arthur, Curious George, and our other kids’ TV series, and creates resources such as PBS TeacherSource for preschool and early elementary school educators. (To find out more about our sites, visit PBS KIDS GO!, and PBS Parents.) If we’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that kids use Web sites very differently than adults do.

What works (and what doesn’t) with young online visitors? Our research has shown us that kids are very attracted to icons and pictures, are more willing to try out buttons and make mistakes than grown-ups, and are much less patient when they have to wait for content to download or can’t quickly find what they’re looking for. Here are five guidelines that we’ve found helpful when we create content for kids.

1. Let kids drive the experience.

Children love to feel like they’re in control, and they are very good at figuring out how to move through a new Web experience. These are some simple ways you can make it easy for kids to navigate your site:

• Use fonts that are easy to read. Emerging readers often find it easier to recognize sans-serif fonts, so choose one that is fairly standard and simple. Also, try to use dark text on light backgrounds.
• Make sure your site has no dead-ends. Include a “Next” arrow or other activity suggestions on each page, so young visitors won’t think they’ve reached the end of your site. For example, the Arthur site does a great job of not overwhelming kids with too many choices, and it uses big red “More” arrows to guide visitors to more options.
• Keep the width of text blocks to a minimum. That will make it easier for young readers to follow the text from line to line.
• Use visual cues whenever possible. For example, group the word “Next” with an arrow pointing to the right, and color each “Go” button green like a traffic light. These visual cues are very helpful for children who are just beginning to navigate Web sites on their own.

This past summer, we redesigned our PBS KIDS home page, which is primarily for children ages three through five. Our main goal was to more closely match the appearance of the page to the new look of many of our TV series. We also decided to tackle an issue that was a perennial problem: How can we list the names of our TV series so preschoolers (who often can’t read) can find their favorite shows?

In the end, we decided to go with our current design. As you can see in the above image, our new wheel showcases many of the characters’ faces, making it a cinch for kids to navigate the site, and the wheel also adds a game-like element to the page. Every character’s face has roll-over text and an audio clip—cues that help emerging readers connect symbols to their corresponding sounds. Our focus groups were very enthusiastic about the new design. In fact, when kids first saw the wheel, many of them couldn’t help saying, “Oooh!”

2. Know what your audience expects to find on the site, and ask for their feedback.

Before beginning to design a site, it’s important to think carefully about your organization’s strengths and why children or parents would be likely to visit it.

We know that the preschoolers who visit our PBS KIDS site are looking for their favorite characters and lots of games. Children six to 12 want those and more when they visit our PBS KIDS GO! site. They’re also looking for opportunities to connect with other kids. We’re also mindful that the parents of both of these groups want a safe place where their children can have fun and find content that has a clear educational purpose. We’ve learned this through years of gathering feedback and listening to our audiences. Here are some simple ways that you can find out what your visitors value:

• Focus groups really do work. At PBS KIDS, we conduct formal testing with a professional moderator (and a two-way mirror) about once a year—and we always tap into focus groups when we’re about to begin a new project or redesign a site. Informal focus groups can also be very useful. We visit schools and computer labs to talk to kids about how they might use our site. If you conduct any after-school activities, I’d suggest setting aside an afternoon to ask students what they’d most like to see on your site. Sometimes we give kids paper and markers and ask them to draw their ideal PBS KIDS site. It’s a great way to get them involved in the design process, and it can yield some fun ideas.
• Once you’ve come up with a preliminary design, it’s important to make sure there aren’t any navigation problems. We often test our working models with kids, paying close attention to where they click. If we notice a particularly sticky problem, we might build three or four prototypes, or even give children some paper printouts of our Web page designs and have them point to where they would go next.
• Feedback links and online surveys can also generate a lot of valuable information. If you’re thinking about redesigning your site, you may want to post questions on it, such as “What else would you like to see on this Web site?” or “Tell us what you like about this site.”

Usability testing and simple focus groups are often the best way to discover the difference between what kids want and what we think kids want. For example, when we were redesigning the PBS KIDS GO! site in 2004, we tried out some new color schemes and designs to see which ones would resonate with elementary school-age kids. In the process, we also designed a new games page that we thought would work with audiences of all ages. It was bright orange with starbursts behind features, and it was much bolder than the games page on our live site.

We asked kids to look at the new page and compare it to the existing page. As we expected, kids who were at least seven years old loved the new, brighter design. But kids six years old and younger really surprised us. Although we thought they’d prefer a page with lots of visual stimuli, they unanimously preferred the original page. It was clear from their body language that they found the orange page a bit overwhelming. On the other hand, they could find their favorite characters more easily on the less busy, soft blue page and, therefore, found it much more manageable. It was an important lesson for us, and made us even more diligent about testing our major design concepts with a wide range of age groups.

3. Kids like to express their opinions and hear what their peers think.

Once kids are older than six or seven, they often understand that the Internet is not just a place for playing games, it’s also a place for communicating. If you’re designing a site for elementary school or middle school students, you may want to provide them with some venues to share their thoughts and ideas with one another.

But before you include any content that kids have created, make sure you’re familiar with the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA states that you cannot collect or post any information that might reveal a particular child’s identity. For instance, if children send you poems, it’s fine to ask them to include their first name, age, and state. But don’t post any inappropriate information, such as kids’ last names or the name of their school. (For more information on COPPA, visit www.ftc.gov/privacy/privacyinitiatives/childrens.html.)

Visitor submission areas can be a lot of fun for kids and can keep your site looking fresh and timely, but they can also be time-consuming to manage. Conversely, if your site doesn’t receive many visitors, an empty submission area can make it appear stagnant and uninviting. Here are a few tips to encourage kids to submit their ideas and creations to your site:

• Create a simple poll and change the question regularly. If you use bar or pie graphs to show the results, nobody will know if 15 or 115 children have voted!
• When posting a question in your submission area, make sure it’s very specific (rather than an open-ended or a yes-or-no question). A statement like “Do you have a nickname? Do you like it or hate it?” will spark tons of responses. When we posted that question on our It’s My Life site, kids often loved to respond to each other’s comments. Case in point: “Ellen the Melon isn’t so bad! Try Sara Beara—yuck!”
• Take advantage of local school events and lesson plans. For example, if you know that second graders are working on a poetry unit, invite them to submit their poems. Children are often thrilled to see their work posted on Fern’s Poetry Club.

4. Kids love sound, animation, and music— but a little goes a long way.

It’s tempting to use animation and sound to make your site more exciting, but make sure these higher-end uses of technology have a clear purpose. For example, if your site is primarily designed for beginning readers, you might want to consider using Flash to provide them with supplementary audio cues.

Flash is one of the most widely used plug-ins and it’s standard on most new computers. That said, every time you use a plug-in, you risk losing some of your audience—especially kids who have computers with dial-up connections or lower processing speeds.

If you do design in Flash, I suggest saving and posting the file in an older version of Flash (six or seven) rather than in the latest version. Visitors who have the latest version will still be able to access your content, and fewer of your visitors will be prompted to download a new version of the plug-in.

If you create a game in Flash, make sure it loads quickly—otherwise kids will soon lose interest. You can produce files so that some content appears while the rest of the application is loading. For an example, check out the “Search for Mami” game on our Dragon Tales site—the dragon Quetzal begins to give instructions while the rest of the game is downloading.

A final note about plug-ins: search engines can’t easily read Flash files and PDFs. So if you’re presenting critical content in a Flash or a PDF file, you should offer an alternative HTML version of it.

5. Content needs to be fresh and timely!

One of the best ways to keep kids coming back is to update your site’s content regularly. There are a few ways you can do that:

• Make sure your content reflects a child’s real world and interests. Acknowledge holidays like Halloween or Valentine’s Day, either with graphics and decorations or by launching a specially themed poll or submission question.
• If you do offer a submission area, feature a different child’s posting each week or every few days. Visitors will want to send you something in hopes that their submissions will also be featured.
• If site updates are taxing, consider randomizing the images on your home page. We sometimes create five or six home-page designs and rotate them each day. The same thing can be done with photos of library activities, “Book of the Day” features, or images of children’s artwork.

What’s the key to creating a superb site for kids? It’s having a great, comprehensive, seeing-around-the-corner plan. You need to carefully plan what you want to deliver, how you’re going to deliver it, and to whom. If you succeed in accomplishing your goals and give visitors what they expect to find, they’ll visit your library’s site again and again and….