Making It Usable for Teens
Nielsen’s Usability of Websites for Teenagers doesn’t offer the best news for keeping teenagers interested in online political campaign information.
The fact that they don’t want overuse of animation and scrolling is good – we don’t want to do that anyway. The news that they don’t like reading is unfortunate.
What can we do to get this non-voting portion of the population interested?
We can make photo galleries more than just a page full of pictures. Each image should be complete with captions. The images should represent the candidate’s public service experience and the various aspects of the issues platform. Each caption can be a hyperlink to longer explanations of the issue platform so that the user can choose to read the details. At a glance, the gallery should visually tell a story.
We can also have an issues page that offers short summaries of each issue with links to extended platform details on that issue. At least they will have a general idea of what the candidate stands for.
2 Comments:
I think the key is to have a section dedicated to 'teens' or 'high schoolers' inviting them to take part, and treating them like adults. Within the section you have more interactive features, as well as sections on how a high schooler can help with the election (volunteering, recruiting volunteers, having high school debates, etc.) Many teenagers I know are extremely devoted to causes, and if a website can tap into that potential by creating an online teen community, you can really tap into a potential mine of free help. Not something to be quickly dismissed....
I like the term "young people" better, especially since teens overlap with college students.
The key to retaining young people as volunteers is to make it fun. Let them make friends. This advice is for headquarters volunteers and internet volunteers. Let there be a community, through friendster-type spaces and IMs, etc. The ones that are into politics now, after all, are tomorrows political leaders.
Also, videos about how policy works, why yours is better than the other guys - graphs, visuals, lots of things can better replace text, and work for visual adult learners as well.
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