Musings about user interface and teens

“Pogosticking”
This is a great term from Jared Spool’s article Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site on the User Interface Engineering web site referred to in the Week #13 Lecture. “When a gallery doesn’t contain the necessary information for the user to decide, they have to resort to ‘pogosticking’. Named after the children’s bouncing toy, pogosticking is when the user jumps up and down in the hierarchy of the site, hoping they’ll eventually hit the content they desire.” When Spool criticizes the interface of SonyEricsson’s and Motorola’s websites I want to cry, not because I have any love for cell phone companies, but because I applied his criticism to the databases that my student’s use.

The User Interface of a Standard Educational Database
When a student does a search on say GALE’s Student Resource Center Gold for a common high school topic like Maya Angelou they are brought to a page with 7 tabs. If they remember what I’ve taught them about the database they can navigate the different tabs (another level of granularity) if not they are unknowingly stuck in sources that are just reference rather than magazines, academic journals, news, creative works, etc. My point is that if ‘pogosticking’ is said to be frustrating to people who want to buy a cell phone, then the kind of ‘pogosticking’ that students do using a standard educational database is outrageous. Educational databases have so far to go before they even begin to match the usability of a common website.

Misconceptions About Teenagers
If you are going to work with teens and computers this is a great page (wwww.useit.com/alertbox/teenagers.html)to spend three minutes reading! “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. . . . Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.” This is of absolutely no surprise to me. I see examples of this everyday (yesterday I had a student express gratified surprise when I showed him how easy it was to use the help function in imovie)! The next time I hear some administrator spouting off about “digital natives” I’m going to send this article.