Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
gigaom.com
Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#2Some very interesting observations there. I don't expect that search would ever go away completely. Society has always had a need to locate new, unfamiliar information. That being said, what might such a stark change in the way a new generation uses technology mean for the current corporate technology giants? Could this be trouble for a company like Google that is nearly completely leveraged on their search functionality?
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#3How much of this is parents' doing? When I showed my kids sites, I made it clear that 'this is how you get to the fun stuff', and anything not that way results in removal of computer privileges. Are kids discovering new content through some medium other than parents or previous experience?
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#4Well, kids tend to access a few sites only. I did when I was younger. I mean: What they need to do on a browser?
Facebook? Wikipedia for school? Hulu? I guess kids needs are more easily found, they need to remember a few sites that cover a big percent of their total usage.
I mean, it's not like they have to make some _hard_ research on topics they are interested due to work or hobbies.
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#5Did anyone really expect 6–9 year-olds to be giant searchers? 6-year-olds have only been reading for a couple of years, and are still mostly on picture books, many reading aloud. Are they supposed to be typing complex text-based queries into google to turn up mostly more text content?
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#6How much of this is parents' doing? When I showed my kids sites, I made it clear that 'this is how you get to the fun stuff', and anything not that way results in removal of computer privileges. Are kids discovering new content through some medium other than parents or previous experience?
Check the comments there--some parents are discussing this.
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#7This part of the actual article contradicts the implication of the title:
I asked Nielsen if he thought children’s tendency towards an app mentality was a broader trend, and that everyone would be less dependent on search in the future — both because these habituated children will age into adulthood and because alternatives to search like apps and the social web are growing in usefulness. He said he didn’t think that was necessarily the case, because kids in the upper age range of the study — 11 and 12 years old — were observed to be avid searchers.
Further, the study itself (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/kids/) was on how children used websites. Not on how children used the the internet. As far as I can tell, he means that children did not use the search features on a particular website. Which I rarely do, too. If I need to search a website, I usually do a search on Google. I've learned that most websites have terrible search results.
But even if the study had demonstrated that young children don't use search engines to navigate the internet, it wouldn't necessarily mean that future generations will use the internet differently. I think people tend to underestimate how subtle searching the internet can be. We see a single text box on Google's homepage, so it has to be simple, right? But that implies that the work to figure out what to put in that text box must happen in our heads. Being able to synthesize what you want to find into a few keywords that you think are likely to be associated with what you're looking for requires sophisticated cognition.
That, to me, would be an interesting psychology topic to study: how early can we effectively search the internet? Is there any connection to the existing models of cognitive development?
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#8Kids map everything by landmarks. Its a sign of maturity to leave this behind and begin to organize a space by a metric.
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#9This part of the actual article contradicts the implication of the title: I asked Nielsen if he thought children’s tendency towards an app mentality was a broader trend, and that everyone would be less dependent on search in the future — both because these habituated children will age into adulthood and because alternatives to search like apps and the social web are growing in usefulness. He said he didn’t think that…
You raise an interesting question. But ultimately the wrong kind of question. We shouldn't be asking ourselves how early can humans effectively search the internet. We should be researching how soon can humans make a search engine that is natural enough a small kid can use.
Now I don't have any kids or access to anything of the sorts, but isn't 6 exactly the age kids start asking questions? Questions that are sometimes hard to answer. This indicates that kids are in fact avid users of search, they just aren't very good at translating their query into something google can usefully understand.
Have you ever tried searching for something you didn't know how to exactly specify? My recent example is seeing a cool car in London. Now that I know what it's called I can just search for "morgan three wheeler". But the first time 'round I started from "three wheel oldtimer" and probably a few others like that, then looking through a lot of wikipedia etc.
Until we can make search engines behave like asking a human "Hey, that car looked cool, what is it?" kids won't be avid searchers.
Re: Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
#10Which is why, for kids under 12, a simple portal of white-listed sites, such as Kongoroo(http://kongoroo.com), is more important than Google.