Audience research

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/young-adults-ux/

Today’s young adults (aged 18 to 25) are a subgroup of the Millennial generation (which includes people born from 1980 to 2000). Most of them are digital natives, meaning they grew up with access to digital communications technology. They are a critically important user group: many of them are studying for degrees, or beginning careers. Some of them are starting families and buying homes. They’re starting to earn more money, and they’re comfortable with spending it online.

 

How Young Adults Differ from Teenagers

It’s tempting to assume that the guidelines provided in our report on how to design for teenagers would apply just as well to designing for young adults — particularly since the youngest young adults (aged 18) are technically teenagers.

However, we found that young adults exhibit different behaviors as compared to the teens we’ve studied.

• While teens enjoy sites that provide interactive features like games and quizzes, young adults like interactivity only when it serves a purpose and supports their current task.

• Teenagers tend to be poor readers, and they prefer nontext alternatives like multimedia content. Some young adults, particularly college students, are strong readers, but they still don’t enjoy reading large amounts of text online. They prefer content that is easy to scan.

• A site targeted to teenagers will not hit the right tone for young adults. Young adults are sensitive to tone. They will feel insulted if they suspect the site is talking down to them, and will notice if the site is trying too hard to appear cool.

• Young adults are much more skeptical of the information presented on websites. They demand more evidence to support claims than teenagers do.

What I have learnt from this

I have learnt that if I want to make something that is targeting the young adult audience, I will have to make sure it isn’t patronising and too simple for the audience, Whilst also I need to be more sympathetic to them and also not just explain things too directly as they are smarter than others which I need to be aware of.