The Digital Divide

by Mark Bauerlein

  • Non-website design is a highly restricted market: there are about three significant vendors of chat and IM software, ten big vendors of mobile phones, and a handful of important music download services. It doesn’t make sense to publish a general report for so few readers. In contrast, there are 60 million websites in the world, and a big percentage of them might be interested in how to serve teenagers better.

  Web design for teens is a broad enough topic to warrant its own specialized study.

  We tested sites in the following genres:• School resources (BBC Schools, California State University, and SparkNotes)

  • Health (Australian Drug Foundation, KidsHealth, National Institute on Drug Abuse)

  • News and entertainment (BBC Teens, ChannelOne .com, MTV, and The Orange County Register)

  • E-commerce (American Eagle Outfitters, Apple, Volcom)

  • Corporate sites (McDonald’s, Pepsi-Cola, The Principal Financial Group, and Procter & Gamble)

  • Government (Australian government main portal, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, and the U.S. White House)

  • Non-profits (Alzheimer’s Association, The Insite, Museum of Tolerance, National Wildlife Federation)

  As this list shows, we tested both specialized sites that explicitly target teenagers and mainstream sites for which teens are part of a larger target audience.

  >>> misconceptions about teenagers

  Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It’s also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics.

  Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. (The success rate indicates the proportion of times users were able to complete a representative and perfectly feasible task on the target site. Thus, anything less than 100 percent represents a design failure and lost business for the site.)

  Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

  We did confirm that teens like cool-looking graphics and that they pay more attention to a website’s visual appearance than adult users do. Still, the sites that our teen users rated the highest for subjective satisfaction were sites with a relatively modest, clean design. They typically marked down overly glitzy sites as too difficult to use. Teenagers like to do stuff on the Web, and dislike sites that are slow or that look fancy but behave clumsily.

  Why are there so many misconceptions about teens? Two reasons. First, most people in charge of websites are at the extreme high end of the brainpower/techno-enthusiasm curve. These people are highly educated and very smart early adopters, and they spend a lot of time online. Most of the teens they know share these characteristics. Rarely do people in the top 5 percent spend any significant time with the 80 percent of the population who constitute the mainstream audience.

  Second, when you know several teenagers, the one super-user in the bunch is most likely to stand out in memory and serve as the “typical teen” persona, even though he or she is actually the outlier. Teens who don’t volunteer to fix your VCR when it’s blinking “12:00” are not the ones you remember.

  >>> no boring sites

  Teens frequently complained about sites that they found boring. Being boring is the kiss of death in terms of keeping teens on your site. That’s one stereotype our study confirmed: teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That’s also why they leave sites that are difficult to figure out.

  Teenagers don’t like to read a lot on the Web. They get enough of that at school. Also, the reading skills of many teenagers are not what one might hope for, especially among younger teens. Sites that were easy to scan or that illustrated concepts visually were strongly preferred to sites with dense text.

  One surprising finding in this study: teenagers don’t like tiny font sizes any more than adults do. We’ve often warned websites about using small text because of the negative implications for senior citizens—and even people in their late forties whose eyesight has begun to decline. We have always assumed that tiny text is predominant on the Web because most Web designers are young and still have perfect vision, so we didn’t expect to find issues with font sizes when testing even younger users. However, small type often caused problems or provoked negative comments from the teen users in our study. Even though most teens are sufficiently sharp-eyed, they move too quickly and are too easily distracted to attend to small text.

  What’s good? The following interactive features all worked well because they let teens do things rather than simply sit and read:• Online quizzes

  • Forms for providing feedback or asking questions

  • Online voting

  • Games

  • Features for sharing pictures or stories

  • Message boards

  • Forums for offering and receiving advice

  • Features for creating a website or otherwise adding content

  These interactive features allow teenagers to make their mark on the Internet and express themselves in various ways—some small, some big.

  >>> differences between age groups

  The following table summarizes the main differences in Web design approaches for young children, teenagers, and adults. (The findings about children are from our separate tests with six- to twelve-year-old users.)

  Clearly, there are many differences between age groups, and the highest usability level for teenagers comes from having designs targeted specifically at their needs and behaviors. Teens have different needs than both adults and young children. This goes for interaction design (as the table indicates) as well as for more obvious factors such as the choice of topics and content style.

  Some websites in our study tried to serve both children and teens in a single area, usually titled something like Kids. This is a grave mistake; the word “kid” is a teen repellent. Teenagers are fiercely proud of their newly won status and they don’t want overly childish content (one more reason to ease up on the heavy animations and gory color schemes that actually work for younger audiences). We recommend having separate sections for young children and teens, labeling them Kids and Teens, respectively.

  >>> teenage opportunities

  The average participant in our study spent five to ten hours per week on the Web. This in addition to the many hours they spent with other technologies.

  According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 83 percent of U.S. teenagers are online. Other advanced countries show similar percentages. Websites should improve their design to better meet this huge user group’s actual needs and desires, rather than target mistaken stereotypes. The opportunities are there.

  < Jakob Nielsen >

  user skills improving, but only slightly

  Originally published in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox (February 4, 2008).

  ENEMIES OF USABILITY have two counterarguments against design guidelines that are based on user research:• “You’re testing idiots—most users are smarter and don’t mind complexity.”

  • “You were right in the past, but users have now learned how to use advanced websites, so simplicity isn’t a requirement anymore.”

  I decided to put these claims to the test in a new study we’re currently conducting. We’ll use the new insights generated by the study to update our course on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability.

  Because we’re testing this year’s sites with this year’s users, the study automatically assesses the second claim.

  We can’t directly assess whether our study participants are idiots, since we don’t subject them to an IQ test. But participants’ comments during all of our studies these past fourteen year
s indicate that we’ve mainly had plenty smart test users. Unless a specific study calls for participants with a different profile, we mostly recruit people with respectable jobs—an engineering consultant, an equity trader, a lawyer, an office manager, a real estate agent, a speech therapist, and a teacher, to take some of the job titles from the first week of our current study.

  One part of the current study tests B2B sites since many of our seminar audience work on such sites. This time, we chose sites targeting dentists in clinical practice, IT managers from big corporations, and CEOs of small businesses. Thus, we have disproportionally many users with these job descriptions. They aren’t stupid.

  One way of quantifying the level of users we’re currently testing is to look at their annual income. In our screening, we look at the user’s personal income, rather than his or her household income. We also recruit an equal number of people making: below $50,000, $50,000–99,999, and $100,000 or more. The following table compares our users with the entire U.S. population (according to the Census Bureau) within the study’s target age range (twenty to sixty years; we’ve covered kids, teens, and seniors in other research): User’s Annual Income Our Participants U.S.Population(age 20-60)

  <$50,000 33% 70%

  $50,000-99,999 33% 22%

  >$100,000 33% 8%

  We’re definitely testing people who are much more successful than the average. We decided to bias the study in favor of high-salary users for three reasons: • We need to test many business professionals and doctors because so many of our seminar participants target these groups, whether for websites or intranets.

  • Wealthy users have more money to spend and are thus more important to seminar attendees who work on e-commerce sites.

  • Even conference attendees who target a broad consumer audience benefit from presentations that are based mainly on studies of wealthy users, because that fact helps them overcome the “dumb users” objection when they take the guidelines back to their teams.

  We’re not neglecting poor people—we have enough of them in the study to learn about their needs. But our participant profile is clearly such that no one could claim that the findings don’t apply to high-end users.

  >>> improved user skills

  So, with the qualifications about our research out of the way, what have we found in recent studies? We’ve seen several indications that users are indeed getting a bit better at using the Web. Almost all users:• are better at physical operations, such as mouse movements and scrolling;

  • are more confident at clicking, and less afraid that they’ll break something; and

  • know the basics of using search and use it more often than we saw in the past.

  In addition,• some users are exhibiting expert behaviors, such as opening a second browser window to compare two websites or changing a PDF file’s zoom level.

  When performing common tasks on sites they often use, most users are incredibly fast and competent. This fact leads us to two interesting conclusions:• Many sites are now good enough that users reward them with loyalty and frequent use.

  • When people revisit such sites, they tend to do the same things repeatedly and develop a high degree of skilled performance—something we rarely saw on websites in the past.

  As an example, one user failed almost every task on unfamiliar websites, yet was highly confident and extremely fast in using her bank’s site to transfer money between two of her accounts.

  >>> browsing and research skills still poor

  Even though users are remarkably good at repeated tasks on their favorite sites, they’re stumped by the smallest usability problems when they visit new sites for the first time.

  People are very bad at coping with information architectures that deviate from their view of the problem space. They also fail to readjust their content interpretation to compensate for changing contexts. For example, when users jump from one information architecture area to another, they often continue to think that the information addresses the previous topic.

  Users are also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information that many sites dump on them. For example, a beginning investor tested E-Trade, which could be a great site to support his initial investments and might gradually grow his site involvement over time. Instead, E-Trade’s first few pages were littered with scary jargon like “ADR” and “ETF.” To escape, he clicked the Active Trading link, assuming this would help him understand how to trade. In fact, it took him to an area for highly experienced investors and it had even more mumbo jumbo. So, this hot prospect concluded that he didn’t dare open an E-Trade account.

  First-time visitors to a site don’t have the conceptual model needed to correctly interpret menu options and navigate to the appropriate place. Lacking this contextual understanding, they waste time in the wrong site areas and misinterpret the area content.

  People’s reading skills are the same as they have always been, emphasizing the importance of writing for the Web. In earlier research, we have studied lower-literacy users, but even the higher-literacy users in our current study had problems with the dense content on many sites. For example, when testing NASA.gov, we asked users to find out when the rings around Saturn were formed. One user did find a page about Saturn, but ended up picking a wrong answer, 1980, which is when additional ringlets were discovered .

  To help new users find their way, sites must provide much more handholding and much more simplified content.

  Making comparisons is one of the most important tasks on the Web, and yet users have great difficulty doing so on most sites. The test participants were particularly happy with those websites that do the comparing and consolidating for them, like kayak.com.

  Why worry about new users’ ability to understand your site when your experienced users are clearly having a jolly old time performing frequent tasks? Because people develop into loyal, experienced users only after passing through the new-user stage. To grow your business, you have to accommodate first-time visitors for whom small difficulties loom large and often spell defeat.

  Also, it’s important to expand your loyal users’ interaction vocabulary to further increase their loyalty. Because they move so fast, experienced users don’t waste much time learning new features. Users have tunnel vision on their favorite sites: unless a new feature immediately proves its worth, users will stick to safe, familiar territory where they can quickly accomplish their tasks and leave.

  By now, our test participants have extensive experience using the Web (mostly three-plus years), and they’re still running into substantial problems online. Waiting for people to get even more experience is not likely to resolve the issues. Websites are just too darn difficult.

  >>> google gullibility

  Users live by search, but they also die by search.

  People turn to search as their first step—or as their second step, if their first attempt at navigating fails. Users typically formulate good initial queries, and vaguely understand how to tickle the search engine into coughing up desired sites when they appropriately modify their main keywords. For example, in our new study, a user looking for a modest gift for a football fan searched for “football trinket.” Five years ago, such a user would most likely have searched “football” and been buried by the results.

  Still, today’s users rarely change their search strategy when the initial query fails. They might modify their first attempt, but they typically stick with the same general approach rather than try something genuinely new.

  For example, one user tested the Mayo Clinic’s site to find out how to ensure that a child with a milk allergy would receive sufficient calcium. The user attempted multiple queries with the keyword “calcium,” but never tried the words “milk” or “allergy.”

  Also, users are incredibly bad at interpreting SERP listings (SERP = Search Engine Results Page). Admittedly, SERPs from Google and the other main search engines typically offer unreadable gibberish rather than decent website descriptions. Still, an expert se
archer (like me) can look at the listings and predict a destination site’s quality much better than average users.

  When it comes to search, users face three problems:• Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy

  • Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site’s likely usefulness

  • Inability to sort through the SERP’s polluted mass of poor results, whether from blogs or from heavily SEO-optimized sites that are insufficiently specific to really address the user’s problem

  Given these difficulties, many users are at the search engine’s mercy and mainly click the top links—a behavior we might call Google Gullibility. Sadly, while these top links are often not what they really need, users don’t know how to do better.

  I use “Google” in labeling the behavior only because it’s the search engine used by the vast majority of our test users. People using other search engines have the same problems. Still, it’s vital to reestablish competition in the search engine field: it would be a tragedy for democracy to let three guys at one company determine what billions of people read, learn, and ultimately think.