Four focus groups were held with young Web users (10 to 13 years of age) to explore design criteria for Web portals. The focus group participants commented upon four existing portals designed with young users in mind: Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Lycos Zone, and Yahooligans! This article reports their first impressions on using these portals, their likes and dislikes, and their suggestions for improvements. Design criteria for children's Web portals are elaborated based upon these comments under four headings: portal goals, visual design, information architecture, and personalization. An ideal portal should cater for both educational and entertainment needs, use attractive screen designs based especially on effective use of color, graphics, and animation, provide both keyword search facilities and browsable subject categories, and allow individual user personalization in areas such as color and graphics.

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This article presents and discusses interviews with 50 grade-6 primary school students about their experience of using the Web to find information for a class project. The children discuss the quantity and quality of textual and image information on the Web versus traditional print sources, and the reasons why they made very little use of any moving images and sound clips on the Web. They also discuss how they searched for information on the Web and the ways in which this differs from looking for information in printed sources. The children overall demonstrate a sophistication both in their appreciation of the Web's strengths and weaknesses as an information source, and in their information retrieval strategies. In their reaction to the Web compared with traditional print sources, they can be categorized as technophiles, traditionalists, or pragmatists. The results from this research study suggest that although the Web can make an important contribution to information retrieval by school students, for the time being, at any rate, a role also remains both for other electronic sources such as CD-ROMs and print materials that are targeted specifically at young users. The Web needs both a more straightforward interface and more information specifically aimed at the young before it can seriously threaten its rivals.

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