I'm in the middle of analyzing the results of our latest usability testing session and thought I'd share some of my findings.
In 'Teenagers on the Web', usability guru Jakob Nielsen points out that teens perform poorly online because they have insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level. He notes a success rate during the testing sessions of 55% for teens compared with an average of 66% across multiple age groups.
My recent sessions, where people of various age groups were asked to perform a series of tasks using a wireframe prototype, reveal a much smaller gap between the success rate of teens (64%) and the aggregate success rate (69%).
What's interesting to note is that 70% of all failures among teens were the result of 'giving up' on the task as opposed to performing the task incorrectly or exceeding a predetermined time threshold. This certainly supports Mr. Nielsen's point about a dramatically lower patience level.
On the topic of 'giving up' I should point out that on average teens gave up a full 16 seconds before reaching the failure time threshold of 00:01:30.
Taking into account the testing environment and the desire to succeed at a given task I would assume that, in unmonitored browsing, a teen may abandon a task somewhere between 50 seconds and one minute. This of course is a very broad generalization that could be impacted by numerous variables but at the very least is founded on research.
In all, my findings support those of Mr. Nielsen even though it's difficult to test reading and research skills on a navigation-centric wireframe. Teens certainly behave differently than adults when it comes to locating information online and should be carefully considered if they're a key target segment of your next web deliverable.