Designed for Good: Community Well-Being Oriented Online Databases for Youth - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 302

12.6.2 Design Requirements
In the section Conceptual Requirements, we have outlined three areas that should
be considered for the design of a youth web space to enhance well-being: content,
quality and interactivity. In this section, we elaborate on specific requirements for
the design of interfaces for youth web spaces to enhance well-being that address the
issues raised in the prior sections. The requirements are as follows: web spaces to
enhance youth well-being should: (a) present information in such a way that dense
information can easily be navigated; (b) use up-to-date designs; (c) be interactive;
(d) show who contributed what; (e) be customisable and easy to personalise,
ultimately allow youth to contribute to the overall design of the web space and (f)
allow users to express their virtual identity.
The issues that are relevant in the context of designing interfaces are presenta-
tion, interactivity and personalisation/customisation. The problems related to pre-
sentation are poor navigation facilities and inappropriate structure to present
information. These observations lead us to the requirement that the information
presented on a web space to enhance youth well-being should be presented in a way
that it is easy to both understand and navigate.
Youth in general are attracted to what is new and innovative and not dusty from
their parent's cupboard. Hence, another requirement to ensure a youth-friendly
appeal is to improve the appearance and thus experience, of websites so that they do
not undermine young people's desire to be and to be seen to be, cool [ 55 ]. The issue
of interactivity originates from limited facilities of current platforms to support
interactivity. Interactivity generally leads to improved user satisfaction and accep-
tance along with increasing the visibility of websites [ 15 ]. Livingstone et al. [ 55 ]
assert that the Internet can facilitate participation in so far as encouraging its users
to sit forward, click on the options, find the opportunities exciting, begin to
contribute content, come to feel part of a community and so, perhaps by gradual
steps, shift from acting as a consumer to increasingly (or in addition) acting as a
citizen. Thus, the emphasis among academics is clear that creating an interactive
environment is what is required to enable Youth to engage with the Internet in a
meaningful manner [ 37 , 55 , 61 ]. The strong evidence in the literature suggests,
however, the importance of this aspect in designing youth web spaces and therefore
we propose that interactivity should be considered.
From another perspective, youth seek to modify the web spaces so as to “leave
their mark” and receive acknowledgement and other positive feedback for their
contributions. Also, youth is seeking for pillars for navigation in a complex and
confusing world and tend to understand knowledge in a social context [ 70 ].
Therefore, we state as a further requirement that youth should directly see who
has contributed which content in order to create social interactivity.
Personalisation and customisation are generally not well supported in current
youth web spaces. As argued for interactivity, users should engage in the web
space. Additionally, the web space should be fun [ 8 ] to use. This is enabled by the
web spaces capability to adapt to their personal needs. Therefore, we state as one