Jacob Nielson just released a study of college students and how they use the Internet.

Nielson is perhaps the world's foremost researcher when it comes to user experience on websites. What he found out about college students confirms several things about web usage. Here are three elements I took from reading a summary of the study.

Website design has important conventions

With each year web sites are becoming more conventional. They are abandoning creative flashy concepts for a sort of vanilla look that people can look at and immediately comprehend. Think newspaper. Those of us who read newspapers (old-timers) expect when we pick up a paper to see the main stories on the front page along with great headlines and expressive photos to tell us what the story is about. If that were not the case, we would abandon the non-conventionally laid-out newspaper for one that was.

It's the same with web pages. We land on a web page we want to see informative headlines and images that let us know at a glance what's beneath. We want menus that are easy to use and take us to places where we are familiar.

Websites are the primary source of important information. Social media is probably not the next big thing in marketing

Nielson's college students clearly divided their time between Facebook and serious tasks. They used facebook to communicate with friends. They sought out web pages to solve particular problems and satisfy needs. If you are considering devoting marketing resources to Social Media to the detriment of our website, think long and hard. Social media is not a free gimmick. If you intend to interrupt people in conversations with friends with a marketing message, you really better have something great to say. The best place to say it is probably on your site where people have come to find out what you have to say rather than barging into a Facebook conversation where no one is really concerned? "So who asked you?"

Search, search engines and search engine optimization¹ will be around for a while

Students are search dominant when it comes to getting what they want or need. They search with greater urgency and less patience than adults. So Search and Google are going to be with us for a while. Keywords and content relevance are as important for college students as for adults.

If you are at all interested in improving your website, read Nielson's College Students on the Web.