Are We Encouraging the Lowest Common Denominator?
Well it is not a big surprise to anyone that teenagers are often misperceived. Not all teenagers drink, smoke, or are obsessed with sex, but now we can add a new one to the list - not all teenagers are good at computers!
Our favorite guy Jakob Nielsen wrote an article "Usability of Websites for Teenagers" discussing the common misconceptions about teenagers using the Internet. "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."
Nielsen states that teen's poor performance are caused by 3 factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level. In order for teen's to like your site, he suggests using less text, cool graphics, interactive features, and large fonts.
Now I think implementing these strategies is the worst thing that could happen to teenagers. The reason why teenagers often do not like to read text and and short attention spans is because they are lazy. Catering websites to this laziness is not going to force them to improve. As these teens get older, websites are going to need to be dumb downed for adults.