School Children experienced with purchasing online
During a presentation that we were asked to give to leavers at Hoebridge Preparatory School in Surrey this week we took the opportunity to get some feedback from a group of boys in the 12-13 year age group.
In terms of pet hates the boys highlighted Pop up ads, slow loading websites, websites with lots of text and unclear navigation and "boring" websites.
Out of the 23 boys present, 21 had made purchases on the internet using "Mum's credit card". They were familiar with online stores such as Amazon and frequented "games" websites with the majority of them spending between one and three hours a day on their home computers ( it would be more, but Mum has a tendency to exercise parental discipline and then there is sibling rivalry)
What do they like ?, well, clear navigation, imagery and keyword search facilities, because time is precious even to a 13 year old (or are they just plain impatient?) and they claim to spend no more than 15 seconds on a website if it does not generate the required information or entertainment value.
Whereas the boys were quite knowledgeable about websites, including basic website construction in HTML which they had experienced in class and used their preferred search engines, it came as quite a suprise to them that sponsored links on the search engines cost the advertising companies money (pay per click - PPC).
The preferred search engine of choice in a clear majority was Google, the second was MSN, with a few using ASK. The big suprise (to us at least) was that not one of them used Yahoo!
It was an interesting and lively session which we hope broadened the youngsters understanding, and we learned from them too.
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