Designing Tourism Websites for Children: Guidelines and Experimental Results

The children use digital devices and begin to navigate on the Web when they are 10.3 years old (on average); furthermore, in each family, their preferences and needs are relevant in the choice of tourism destinations. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on children travel and of websites, specifically designed for them, based on their own perspectives. In this work, we discuss the importance of conceiving and creating usable and accessible websites for children, and propose guidelines relative to the design, the structure, the navigation, the gamification and the language. We applied these guidelines two case studies: the first one is a dedicated section of the tourism website of a Naturalistic Oasis located close to Treviso, in Italy, the second one is a website for tourism activities dedicated to families that want to visit the city of Venice, Italy. In both cases, we present experimental results.