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Permalink Reply by Mark Cheverton on October 17, 2008 at 15:10

There's isn't a great amount of good stuff written about usability for young people. The defacto web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has some stuff up here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html

Juliet Tzabar has also written some good points aimed at the younger age group here: http://www.screamoutloud.co.uk/stuff_we_know.html

and there are various research papers, but often these are focused more on behavior than usability, so I think this is something that needs some focus in the usability community.

Towards the end of the presentation I show some typical websites from services such as Piczo and the Darlington youth website we designed in partnership with local young people. Both of these demonstrate a common design aesthetic, often repellent to adults, which can also be seen by spending some time just viewing a few myspace pages.

A few general points to throw out there:

* Young people use their websites as an expression of identity, often producing cluttered, 'loud' pages with a tremendous amount going on
* Young people are very tribal, hence the practice of using graphics or manga rather than real images. For example we have had research feedback such as 'shes a goth, I'm emo so this site isn't for me'
* Young people 'snack' so lean towards lots of short form content. Look to mediasnackers for more on this meme

There's much more that can be said on this subject which should probably make up a more considered blog post informed by a proper literature review when I have some time.

Permalink Reply by Steven Flower on October 4, 2008 at 9:40

Thanks Mark

I know you don't mention PAYP (Positive Activities for Young People) in the presentation, but this term is often mixed up with the Promoting Positive Activities (PPA) - Things to Do, Places to Go - which (as far as I can see) are two different things?!

Not helpful to any of us (the jargon, not the presentation ;-))!