How Young People Use the Internet
The amount of children who use the internet is widespread and growing continually every year. Most children are generally enthusiasts and they find the internet easy to use, want to use it for fun, games, chat and make friend. The difference between the boys and the girl using the internet is that boys prefer sports game site, while girls more prefer towards music and TV. [4]
Depending on age and particular circumstances and interest, children can use the internet in different ways and different reasons. Very little kids as young as two or three years can be introduced to the compute. They can enjoy the internet on a more particular level. [1]
Children like rich graphic, animation and friendly narration. Most children are based on the children how kids supposedly behave, typical internet skill and common knowledge of the web. Most children websites are complex and convoluted interaction design that stumped the children. Some children had success in using website intended for adult when the web design is simply and compliance.
Differences between Children and Adult Users
The use of the internet may vary based on age: while adult shop, bank, and catch up on the new online and use internet primary for work related activities, kids are gaming, downloading homework help, and just plain socializing and use primarily for entertainment and socialization purposes. Children have their own likes, dislikes, curiosities, and needs that are not the same as adults. Various design elements, animation, multimedia effects and colorful page tend to work for children.
The significant differences between children and adults users are:
* Animation and sound effects are important positive design elements for children. These may occurs a good first impression that the users to stay with the site.
* Children are desirable to scrub the screen with the mouse when they want to find clickable area or to enjoy the sound effects.
* Geographic navigation metaphors work that is children preferred the pictures of rooms, village, 3D maps and other simulated environment.
* Most of children are seldom scrolled the web page and they particularly interacted with information and contents that are visible above the fold.
· Most children are enthusiastic to read the instruction before starting a new game. On the other hand, most adult users hate to read the instruction and try to use the website without reading about what they need to do. [2]
Usability Problems in Children
On the web, usability is essential aspect of the website. If the website is difficult to use, get lost on a website, web's site information is hard to read and homepage fails to clearly state, the user will abandon these website immediately. Most of the children are lack of patience when they face with complexity of the website design, so poor usability can let them leaving website. Moreover, today children's internet skill level is also very varied. The diverse nature of this aspect causes particular usability challenges. The good usability of website for the children should be quick and easy to learn, efficient to use, easy to remember.
There are several types of web usability problems. Some problems that caused difficulties for the children are:
· Unclear navigational confirmation:
uncertainty of user location that can confuse the user both within site and when they leaving the sites.
· Inconsistent navigation options:
the same destination is indicated by in different ways, so that the user can repeatedly access the same feature because they don't know they have been there.
· Non-standard interaction techniques:
this can cause predictable problem, for instance, making it impossible for children to select preferred game using “games machine”.
· Lack of perceived clickability:
affordances such as overly flat graphics, which can cause the user to miss features since they didn't notice the links.
* Fancy wording in interfaces:
it can confuse user and prevent users from understanding the available choice.
* Page Length:
some of the web pages are too long; most children usually not scroll down the page.
* Too many Choices:
there may have many topic and sub-topics under category to choose the user needs, users can confuse to go to the desired page.
· Terminology:
using unfamiliar words, it can cause the user such as youngest children cannot understand the word.
· Font size and pictures:
use a few picture and a smaller font size, most children liked the website with the larger font size and animation pictures.
· Advertisements:
a lot of animated advertisement, this was very distracting to the user. Some children cannot differentiate between advertisement and contents and some children could not know how to close the advertisement (pop-ups). [3]
Many children have visited sites that don't satisfy their needs. They have strived with poor designed website that are hard to find what they need, slow to access, the pages lacking coherent internal navigation and including links that lead nowhere.
If the website have high usability, the user will get the benefits from the usability such as they will not frustrated with the website, enjoy interacting with the website, achieve their goals effectively and efficiently and they will develop confident and trust over the website. The content of the site should be cool and the design must offer the high usability to the children.
References
1. http://www.nap.edu/netsafekids/inter_kids.html
2. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html
3. http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/children_internet.asp
4. http://www.clickz.com/150351
