The target audience

1
The target audience

• The users you expect to utilize your site form
  that sites target audience
• Because the Web is a voluntary medium, users
  must want to come to a site in order for that
  site to be successful
• Therefore, good Web design must be user-centered
• That is, it must focus primarily on the needs and
  expectations of the users in the target audience
• If users dont have a strong motivation to visit
  (or revisit) the site, the site will not have any
  visitors
• If visitors cannot easily utilize the site to
  accomplish their tasks, they will go elsewhere
• Its necessary to meet the needs and expectations
  of the stakeholder as well, but not at the
  expense of the user experience
• A site that fails to satisfy the goals of its
  stakeholder cannot be considered commercially
  successful for either the stakeholder or its
  designers
• To practice user-centered design, its imperative
  to know as much as possible about the users
• In other words, knowledge of the target audience
  must be accumulated very early in the design
  process

2
User-driven design

• Users control their own destiny on the Web
• As a Web designer, its essential to recognize
  that users also control your destiny
• Keep your users happy, and you too will be happy
• Disappoint your users, and you too will be
  disappointed
• Keep the user at the center of every design
  decision
• Users must be able to locate, comprehend and
  navigate your site
• The easier you make these tasks, the more
  successful the site will be
• Avoid the common pitfall of losing sight of the
  fact that the site you are designing is for the
  users
• Designers often (unwittingly) design sites for
  themselves, not their users
• A site that satisfies the needs and expectations
  of its designer has a guaranteed audience of one
• Whereas a site that satisfies the needs and
  expectations of a sizable portion of the
  population has a potential audience of millions
• Therefore its vital to incorporate target
  audience analysis into your product plan
• Make your design user-driven, dont expect your
  users to be design-driven
• Design-driven users are most commonly driven
  only to your competition!

3
Target audience analysis

• Cohen distills the process down to five essential
  questions
• Who are my users?
• Youd plan an event differently for a bunch of
  Southern debutantes than you would for a group of
  Hells Angels
• How many are there?
• Theres a world of difference between organizing
  an event for a dozen people and organizing an
  event for a million people
• How do they access the Web?
• Nursery schools, dance clubs and nursing homes
  are all designed with different types of access
  in mind
• What do they need?
• Grocery stores have different inventories than
  souvenir shops and auto dealerships
• What do they do?
• Test drives, free samples, wireless hotspots,
  pretzel bowls and the like all grew out of
  observing user behavior
• Reorganizing the shelves in a grocery store is a
  very different consideration than reorganizing
  the shelves in a souvenir shop

4
User profiles

• The end result of a target audience analysis will
  be some form of user profile
• There are several possible foundations which may
  be mixed and matched to generate user profiles
• Demographics are the hard facts youd most likely
  find in an official census
• Age, gender, ethnicity, location, education,
  income, occupation, etc.
• Webographics are the hard facts concerning
  usage of the Web
• Experience, frequency, access location, time of
  use, bandwidth, hardware and software used, etc.
• Psychographics are fuzzier qualifications of
  attitudes, expectations and interests
• Psychographics often involve stereotypes and
  other ad hoc classifications of individuals
• Avoid negative or emotionally charged stereotypes
• Behavioral factors help to organize and
  categorize users based upon what they do
• Try to focus on behaviors and activities that
  have some relation to your site
• Site-specific factors help to fine tune your
  focus
• What level of site-specific expertise or
  experience do you expect your users to bring to
  the table?
• Most sites will have several distinct target
  audiences
• Work up a user profile for each and prioritize
  them

5
Personas

• Its very easy to convince yourself that you are
  an average user of your site
• To counteract this tendency, its important to
  give your average user some semblance of concrete
  form
• Thats where personas can be very useful
• Personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary
  users
• To be useful, they must be carefully based upon
  user profiles
• A persona takes the general characteristics that
  describe your target audience and puts an
  individual face on them
• Each persona should have specifics reflective of
  the user profile on which it is based
• Its advisable to include a photo with each
  persona to make that fictional individual easier
  to visualize as real
• There should be at least one persona for each
  user profile youve created
• Once created, personas should be readily
  available to all members of the design team
• When faced with decisions, team members can
  examine the possible choices from the
  perspectives of the available personas

6
Scenarios

• Once personas are available, a common way to
  utilize them is by developing scenarios
• Scenarios are realistic, but hypothetical,
  situations demonstrating various ways in which
  the personas might utilize the site
• Each scenario should carefully describe the
  entire process from the personas inception of an
  idea or task, through finding your site, to
  fulfillment of the idea or completion of the task
• Make each scenario as realistic as possible,
  including the inevitable distractions and errors
  that arise along the way
• Consider each scenario from the perspective of
  all applicable personas
• Artificially sterile or structured scenarios are
  not very realistic and therefore of very little
  use
• They dont all have to be worst case scenarios,
  but there should be plenty of bad case scenarios!

7
User research and testing

• While personas and scenarios are very useful
  tools, they are a poor replacement for working
  with living, breathing members of the target
  audience
• Dont wait until the site is done to get input
  from real users
• Try to get actual users involved in the process
  as early as possible and keep them involved
  throughout
• Performing research and usability testing with
  real users, will help inform and expand your
  personas and scenarios
• Since few budgets will support the expense of
  just paying real users to hang out all day, your
  personas and scenarios will still be necessary
• Start with the personas and scenarios, but expand
  or refine them in light of your experiences with
  real users
• Interviews with and observation of real users is
  an integral part of good Web design
• Without this input, you run the risk of designing
  in a vacuum
• And the end result is likely to be a site thats
  of little or no use to anybody