"Despite their image for being tech savvy, teenagers aren't as adept as adults when it comes to using the Internet, according to a report released Monday," reports the Mercury News.
"Teens ages 13 to 17 were able to complete assigned tasks on the Web 55 percent of the time, compared with 66 percent for adults, according to Nielsen Norman in Fremont, a firm known for studying how consumers use technology. The teens were hampered by poor reading and research skills and were more prone to leave a site after encountering difficulties.
"'If things aren't immediately apparent, they go away,' said Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the firm. 'Their distaste for reading was a big surprise. It has to be very short, brief text and big pictures'."
Comment: Jakob has written a piece about the report on his Use It site. One paragraph is particularly interesting:
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 40s 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.
My own long-held theory is that Web designers use tiny font sizes because they are extremely stupid people, and a significant majority of them are completely clueless about this whole Web thing. This may sound harsh, but there is no shortage of evidence.
