Children's use of government information systems: design and usability

ABSTRACT

While generally not recognized by e-government researchers, children and teens are an audience for web sites featuring information about the activities, services, or missions of numerous federal government organizations, and perhaps should be viewed as an audience for community information presented by municipal and county governments. This paper describes our efforts to design a user interface for middle-school aged users of a government-sponsored community information system. We review the literature related to children's use of the Internet and children's use of online information systems. Following a review our past design efforts, we present our most recent design followed by data from usability and satisfaction tests with young users from various grade levels. The paper ends by presenting some observations and comments that might be helpful in future work by government designers of children's web pages and information systems.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
children, city government, collaboration, communication, county government, digital government, experience design, information system, participatory design, user-centered design, web 2.0, youth services