[Sigia-l] Youth research

[Linda Gardner (bigsnap)]

Hi Joe, 

Good luck with what sounds likes a very cool project. It's really 
hard to find usability info about kids/teens because of the COPPA-
necessitated development approach to this age group. 

However, I have a private collection of articles about youth online 
that I"ve collected over the years, including the recent neilson 
kids report. Also, my past two projects were kid-oriented (popsicle.
com launched in April, americangirl.com just launched sept 3). For 
the Americangirl.com site, we did quite a bit of primary research,
ranging from surveys to photographic studies of girls. The age group 
is a bit younger than you're looking at, but I'd be happy to talk 
to you/email and share some of the results 

I'd share some now, but I need to refresh my memory! Some relevant 
things I remember is that boys surprisingly often go online in groups,
while girls tend to go online alone, or if younger, with parents.
Kids, like everyone else, prefer well-organized sites - this goes 
against much common practice (i.e. people think kids want "cutting 
edge" navigation etc. with flashing lights all over the place - not 
necessarly so!)

If you'd like to give me a call, you can reach me at 847-866-8509 
or 312-952-9511 cell, or just email me here at linda at bigsnap.com.


Best -

Linda Gardner
linda at bigsnap.com


Message: 6
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:00:13 -0400
From: "joe " <joe at sokohl.com>
Reply-To: <joe at sokohl.com>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Subject: [Sigia-l] IA for Teenagers

Hi all,

A friend is doing a not-for-profit Web site. He's come to me for some 
help on the human interaction part of the site.
The site's an information site geared for 14-18 year olds. I've done 
some 
research on ACM's digital library, but I've found very little research 
(a nice 1996 article about usability testing with teens at Iomega). It 
seems that I remember a thread along these lines appearing on SIGIA.
Any 
pointers y'all can provide? I'm looking for both usability-oriented 
data 
as well as IA-specific research, findings, or even anecdotes.

Many thanks,

joe


Linda Gardner
linda at bigsnap.com