What are teens good for?

According to Jakob Nielsen's article on teens and website usability, they have a lower success rate of website use than adults. Due to, "insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level." The article also goes on to describe how they are much different users than adults. So why does this matter for a campaign manager?

Well, teenagers make great volunteers. They have tons of free time, are willing to do crappy grunt work (stuff envelopes, make phone calls, walk door-to-door) and a certain segment tend to become deeply involved in causes. So there is a reason for every candidate to court teenagers to their campaign. The only problem, of course, is that they don't vote, so a smart candidate can never willingly design their messages or website to cater to teenagers, they must focus on those who are able to, and probably will, vote.

So if you can't design your website for teens, how can you use the site to draw them in? Nielsen provides a few suggestions that will be appealing to them. First, you should make a section of the site dedicated solely to teenagers. Nielsen writes, "Some websites in our study tried to serve both children and teens in a single area, usually titled something like Kids. This is a grave mistake; the word "kid" is a teen repellent. Teenagers are fiercely proud of their newly won status and they don't want overly childish content (one more reason to ease up on the heavy animations and gory color schemes that actually work for younger audiences). We recommend having separate sections for young children and teens, labeling them Kids and Teens, respectively."

Second, put a lot of interactive, but not reading intensive, activities on it. Particularly effective, "Online quizzes, Forms for providing feedback or asking, questions, Online voting, Games, Features for sharing pictures or stories, Message boards." It isn't hard to picture how all of these suggestions could be tailored to a campaign.

So a rudimentary outline for how to approach the teenage crowd from a campaign website comes into focus.
1.)Don't play to them on the front page beyond a link to the teen section (maybe an online poll, who doesn't like those?) because it is more important to reach people who can vote.
2.) Label the link 'teen' and make the content reasonably mature without being overlycomplicated.
3.) Have the content be highly interactive and community building.
4.) Send 'em out to work on your campaign!