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Targeting your audience and understanding their motivations
and goals is helps to create a positive user experience.
A website's content and functionality should support
the needs of its audience. A website should be a clear
and effective way for a typical user coming to the
site to meet their goals. Gathering general demographics
is the first step. Identifying the characteristics
of your primary and secondary audience base will help
to create a targeted interface and determine how you
will structure your content, messaging, and design.
The more detail and depth you can provide will help
to create a mental picture of the user—and will
help the team to think like a user, and not a developer.
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Who's coming to your site? Why are they coming? And
what do they hope to achieve once they get there?
As your client fills out the client
survey, you'll find that many questions
address the specifics of the intended audience. Demographics—a
listing of specific information about your target
audience—are important, and should be gathered
by interviewing the client. However, demographics
tell only part of the story. Through interviews with
both the client and users of the existing site, you
can begin to create detailed profiles of targeted
users. A user profile describes a particular type
of user you are targeting to use the redesigned site.
By creating a collection of such profiles, you can
begin to "humanize" the demographic data
and craft personalized stories that clearly define
your design goals to the client. Additionally, user
profiles can aid your designers throughout the creative
process by breaking down the demographic data into
information they can easily relate to. Each user profile
should include the following information:
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Age
range |
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Gender |
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Occupation |
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Salary
range |
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Online
experience (newbie, experienced, very savvy) |
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Online
frequency (how many hours per day? per week? per
month? |
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Online
location & activities (at work or at home?
what do you do at work versus at home?) |
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Connectivity
(modem, DSL, ISDN, T1) |
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Types
of sites visited |
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Online
purchases per month |
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General
and Specific User Profiles
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be generic or specific, depending on the type
of information you're able to collect, and the
amount of time you're able to allocate to creating
the profiles. General information includes such
basic demographic information as user age, occupation,
salary range, online experience, and connection
speeds. A general profile gives you an idea of
the type of person you are targeting. In contrast,
gathering specific information will help you create
actual profiles of typical users. The more specific
you can be—who they are, what they do for
a living, what their environment is like, what
they do in their spare time—the more targeted
your site design, navigation, and content will
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General Sample User Profile:
Typical user is a male/female between 25-40 years
old; highly educated, very computer savvy. Goes online
daily, with high-speed connections at work and at
home. Conducts research, purchases online at least
once a month, PC-based, 4.0 browsers and above. Is
an avid reader, reading between 1-3 books per week
(both fiction and non-fiction). Favorite sites include
Amazon and Half.com.
Specific Sample User Profile:
Liz is a 34-year-old professor with a Ph.D, balancing
a life of teaching and motherhood. At school, she
has a PC with a T1 connection and is online (when
not teaching) doing research and writing reports several
hours a day. She's an active online user and very
used to purchasing, conducting detailed searches,
and researching online. At home, she's on a 56k modem
(DSL is still not available in her neighborhood.)
After preparing dinner and getting her two daughters
(ages 2 and 4) off to bed, she has a few hours to
enjoy a bit of personal time online. She's an avid
reader and often searches for books and music at online
stores such as Half.com and Amazon.com for personal
items and gifts.
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| Detailed Sample User Profile
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Paige McCormick is an elementary art teacher,
artist, and girls' Little League track coach
in Portland, Oregon. She's 35 years old and
lives in northwest Portland near Forest Park
with her dog Ruth Ann (Ruthie), who's a year
and a half old.
Paige owns her house and spends a great deal
of time fixing it up and gardening. She leads
a very busy and active lifestyle. When not working,
Paige spends her time outdoors running, mountain-biking,
and playing with Ruthie.
Paige is an enthusiastic dog-owner and goes
out of her way to provide for her dog. She's
given up on stuffed animal toys—they're
so cute, but Ruthie guts them immediately and
eats the fiberfill. Paige studies dog behavior
and training techniques as a hobby. She enjoys
living near Forest Park, especially since it's
an excellent place for Ruthie to romp and chase
squirrels.
Paige has a 56k modem but is thinking about
upgrading to DSL service soon. She uses a Mac
G3 and considers herself very computer-savvy.
She does a significant amount of her shopping
online, which she finds saves her a great deal
of time, although sometimes the shipping is
a deterrent. She does appreciates the automatic
monthly deliveries of dog food that she orders
online.
Paige loves smaller pet shops that specialize
in items that appeal to her aesthetics and dislikes
large warehouse-style pet stores such as PetClub,
although she admits they do provide necessities
at a reasonable price. |
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Understanding the user—their demographic information,
goals, and habits—is a key part of developing
user profiles. To take the process a step further,
we need to identify the actual situations or scenarios
a targeted user might experience in a typical day
as he or she attempts to achieve different goals on
the site. The user profile describes the user, while
the user scenario describes how that user interacts
with the site.
Put yourself once again in the user's shoes and think
of the actual online and offline circumstances surrounding
the user and the task. Creating various scenarios
within the site should take you through several tasks,
and lead the user down different paths. Perhaps in
one situation the user wants to buy a CD-ROM online
for a gift. Perhaps another user wants to browse through
new artists to determine if he wants to download a
sample clip. Whatever the situation, it's important
to think about the user, the task, and the situation
together in order to truly gauge the optimal path
for the user to follow.
General Sample User Scenario:
Kathleen is a busy executive who hasn't had a vacation
in three years. She's online daily, accessing a T1
line from work and a DSL line from home. She searches
online for "adventure travel" after deciding
that she needs a break and would like to go somewhere
active, adventurous, and fun. She's heard there are
excellent rafting trips offered in Costa Rica. After
browsing a few sites to determine which might be a
good fit, she selects Away.com and begins to explore,
search, and gather information. She searches for "Costa
Rica," and is provided with several activity
choices, from horseback riding to rafting. She narrows
her search to rafting and is given a list of a dozen
or so to choose from, based on trip duration and activity
level. She calls the site's posted 800 number and
is able to speak to a live customer service representative
who can see that she is on the Costa Rica page, which
impresses Kathleen greatly. Mixing online offerings
(ticketing, booking, airfare) with offline offerings
(customer service, phone numbers, etc.) is helpful
and convenient for a busy executive like Kathleen,
and add to her overall user experience.
Examples need not be complex—they should just
be "real." Even a conversation or two about
a typical user and his needs and experiences with
a site is valuable for the team to assist in creating
the ultimate user experience.
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| Detailed
Sample User Scenario |
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Paige spoils her dog, Ruthie, senseless. Being
a devoted dog owner, she's well-versed in online
pet stores. Her current favorite is Petco.com,
who deliver all Ruthie's dog food—and a
lovely selection of rawhide chews—monthly.
Since Ruthie has pretty much managed to neurotically
gnaw and dig her current cushion into small,
barely identifiable bits of canvas and fluff,
today Paige has decided to buy Ruthie a fresh
new bed.
She starts her shopping by going to Petco.com.
She then selects the Dog area under the header
"Go Shopping" by clicking the happy
panting dog icon. Once in the Dog Shopping area,
she uses the expanding tree menu system to navigate
her way into the "Cuddler Beds" category.
After examining a selection of five or six beds,
she clicks the Product Options button for the
"Bed Buddies Lounger" bed in blue.
Here she notes that the cover is stain-resistant
and machine-washable and that it has a comfy
faux sheepskin lining. Paige thinks that Ruthie
will like that (and is amused by "Bed Buddies"
nomenclature) and clicks the Add to Cart button.
She's now prompted to login or register as
a new customer. As a regular site user, she
logs in with her e-mail address and password.
She then reviews her billing and shipping information,
followed by her saved credit card information.
Satisfied that all is in order, she clicks the
Place Order Online button and completes her
order.
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The value of the discovery phase is in allowing the
development team to get the inside track on the client's
industry, audience, and competition. Seeing the competition
from an objective standpoint allows the developer
to see what works—and what doesn't work—firsthand.
When the discovery process is complete, your team
should have a clear picture of the target audience(s),
their motivations, and the competitive landscape—what
other companies are doing that's successful and why.
Budget or no budget, it's important to conduct some
sort of initial research. For teams requiring additional
information regarding functionality, feature, and
other in-depth information, it's important to know
that this is just the beginning of the discovery process.
The information you've gathered will enable your team
to focus on the site from the user perspective instead
of from the developer point of view. Allow the team
to conduct research as their expertise and comfort-level
allow, while the project manager creates the project
plan that's outlined in the next section: Define.
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