People naturally create categories. Just as
learning a native language happens naturally,
so does learning to categorize the world
around us.
Categorizing doesn’t emerge as a skill until about age seven. Thinking about
categories just doesn’t make sense to children before that. After age seven,
however, kids become fascinated with categorizing information.
If there is a lot of information and it
is not in categories, people will feel
overwhelmed and try to organize
the information on their own.
It’s always a good idea to organize information for your audience as much as
possible.
It’s useful to get input from people on
what organization schemes make the
most sense to them, but the critical
thing is that you organize the
material. What you call things is often
more important than how you have it
organized.
If you’re designing sites for children under age seven, any organization into categories you are doing is
probably more for the adults in that child’s world, not for the child.