The secret is colors; lots of bright colors. Colors, along with friendly icons and pictures, are what will make a new federal website for kids a success, according to its designers at 18F.
The site is everykidinapark.gov, the landing page for Every Kid in a Park, an Interior Department program to promote the National Park system.
In the website’s first iteration, “we featured bucolic landscapes and a nightscape. But kids found the dark photo scary, and they wanted to see more pictures of people playing and swimming. We found more daytime photos and photos with kids in hammocks and families exploring,” wrote Emilieigh Barnes in a blog post about the experience.
The program is geared to fourth graders and allows them free access to all federal lands and water, including national forests, national parks, wildlife refuges and marine sanctuaries, for a full year. Parents and friends can get free access too.
The website includes a comprehensive list of locations, information about the program and other resources, and a way to print paper passes allowing access. It was designed specifically to encourage 10-year-olds to use it, rather than deferring to adults.
“As a fan and ardent visitor of national parks myself, I’ve been so happy to be involved in a project that is focused on getting the next generation out there exploring,” said lead developer Christine Cheung, quoted in the blog post.
But designing a site for kids brings a special set of challenges. The developers had to consider a 10-year-old’s reading level, interests and attention span.
“Word choice was a challenge, too,” Barnes wrote. “We originally called ‘passes’ ‘vouchers,’ but most of our users didn’t have that word in their vocabulary. They also didn’t know what ‘federal’ meant. So we eliminated it wherever we could — no easy feat on a federal website.”
Read the full first-hand account at gsa.gov.
