Let's Talk Teens

I've been an active lurker on many discussion groups over the years, enjoying the topics and soaking in the knowledge, but have not been actively posting, until now. With the power in my fingers to actually create a post (and to think of something, too!) here's to my first one....... Let's Talk Teens.

From an earlier post about our continuing work with the teen area of the website, I'd like to share the great focus group input received last week from 3 teen boys. Because they are minors, they are referred to in this story as Ichi, Ni and San (for those who might know Japanese, that's one, two and three). Some basic observations:

*they are so busy with school and related activites they don't have time to play on the computer during the school year
*they don't actively IM but said they did so in middle school when they did have more time
*their primary means of communicating with friends is their cell phone. Think of the western movies where the cowboys had guns strapped to their waists and you get the idea that the cell phone is as necessary a "piece" - but for different reasons
*they aren't actively engaged with myspace, either. Ni had a myspace account but had not kept it up

About website design:
*they actually liked our site (yea!) for the photos we put up next to each story
*they liked our content, too, and thought they would post their original content to our site (now that they know about it! but that's a whole different post on how to engage teens......). I thought it was most interesting that they said they would not even care for a monetary incentive to post, just the idea of having it up where their friends could come and comment was good enuf!
*while they like color and were aware of design elements on various web pages we cruised, they said to keep it simple

What do we get out of this?
<>that by the time teens hit high school, they're not having much free time. My personal conclusion is that our teen site is more geared to middle schoolers
<>that we need to continually market our site where teens can post content......short attention spans....competing interests...etc

I got a kick out of talking with this group. They were open and engaged in conversation, willing to share information and a slice of their life with me. As we continue our process of focus grouping, I hope all of this information gels into a great design that the teens will be so thrilled with they will share it with their friends!