Jakob Nielsen's knows a lot about building websites. When he makes a pronouncement on something, normally substantiated by research, it is worth listening.
The blurb about his latest report makes fascinating reading (Misconceptions about Teenagers)
There is the common misapprehension that teenagers are all technowizards who surf the Web with abandon and oldies spend most of their time trying to tame their errant mouse.
His study refuted this stereotype. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. He 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 they found for adult users.
Teens' poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.
This summary of the report goes on to gives some very useful and amusing commentary. The following is a quote that web designers should have forcibly inserted into their screensavers.
“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” (I am not sure this is always true!). “These people are early adopters and 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 exception. Teens who don't volunteer to fix your VCR when it's blinking "12:00" are not the ones you remember.“ Dick Stroud www.20plus30.com
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