Iroquois West CUSD 10

Not used (young kids) Relied on (older kids)

Back button

Readability level

8th to 10th grade text for broad consumer audiences

Advertising and promotions Can't distinguish from real content Ads avoided (banner blindness); promos viewed skeptically

And it's confusing when pages have multiple links to the same destination, because users don't know whether the various links actually point to the same place or have slightly different meanings.

avoid redundant navigation schemes for adult users

Kids suffer from a learned path bias: they tend to reuse the same method they've used before to initiate an action. In our studies, we often saw kids who had been successful with a certain approach to a site stick determinedly to that approach over and over again, even as it failed them during subsequent tasks that required them to use a different navigation scheme.

The main predictor of children's ability to use websites is their amount of prior experience.

On a more negative note, kids still don't understand the Web's commercial nature and lack the skills needed to identify advertising and treat it differently than real content.