Children's Websites - Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for September 13 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html

Summary:
New research with users aged 3-12 shows that older kids have gained
substantial Web proficiency since our last studies, while younger kids
still face many problems. Designing for children requires distinct
usability approaches, including targeting content narrowly for different
ages of kids.

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Usability Week 2010 conference

  * San Francisco, CA: October 3-8
  * Copenhagen, Denmark: October 18-22
  * Edinburgh, Scotland: October 25-29
  * Las Vegas, NV: December 5-10

Full program:
  > http://www.nngroup.com/events

DEADLINE to save 10% on advance registration for Copenhagen:
  * THIS FRIDAY, Sept. 17

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KINDLE 3

The new, smaller and softer, Kindle feels great in the hand. Holding it
makes the iPad seem quite clunky in comparison.

Mainly, the new version is a great redesign. Sadly, the "next-page" button
is now harder to press; at least with the way I hold my Kindle. With the
Kindle 2, my thumb rested on top of this button, so it was essentially no
work to turn the page. On Kindle 3, I have to move my fingers around
between a comfortable reading position and the position needed to turn the
page.

Not good, since "next page" is the second-most used Kindle feature (after
reading the text).

The text now definitely has higher contrast with the background and seems
a good deal more legible. I would estimate that Kindle has gained about 2%
in reading speed with this latest release. (Whether that's enough to
justify the cost of an upgrade obviously depends on how much you read.)

I am not going to run a formal measurement study to find out exactly how
much reading speed has increased. Getting statistically significant
results would probably require about 2,000 test users, given the small
difference between the old and the new numbers.

In usability we can usually get away with testing a handful of users:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

This is because we are looking for huge effects. Usually business metrics
double after user testing:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html

If we only found 2%'s worth of insights after a usability study, we would
have failed, and this has never happened yet. Sad to say, user interface
design is enough of an inexact science that there are always lots of
things to uncover in user testing, even for sites that use the very best
of designers. (And for more average-designed sites: man, the list of
findings is long, even with only 5 users.)

In our recent study of reading from tablets vs. books, we only had to test
32 users, because the effect size was fairly big:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html

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VIRAL VIDEO LESS VALUABLE THAN EPOSODIC MEDIA

AdAge has an interesting opinion piece about "viral" videos by Jim
Louderback (whom I respect highly for his previous work on projects like
ZDTV):

  > http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=145636

Yes, there will always be another cute cat or lightsaber-wielding nerd
that gathers gazillion views in a few days. But the two problems with
chasing this strategy are:
  (a) Odds are against *your* video being the one that tickles the masses'
bizarre taste.
  (b) Even if you do get a hit, the value is pretty low from one-hit
wonders, because one-time drive-by users don't engage with the site they
visit (particularly if the video is hosted elsewhere, so that most of them
they don't even visit your site).

Even though Louderback's article is about video, the same goes for regular
Web pages: getting a million hits from Digg or Fark rarely builds
long-term value.

The article makes the point (which jives with my own experience) that
there is much more value to be had from the sustainable audience that
gradually builds when you produce "episodic content" (say, a video
*series* or a column like my own).

I wrote about user loyalty 13 years ago:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9708a.html
One of the ideas I launched back then (frequent-browser points) is still
very rare.