Targeting your audience and understanding their motivations and goals helps to create a positive user experience. The web site's content and functionality should support the audience's needs. A web site 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 create a mental picture of the user - and will help the team to think like a user - rather than a developer.
Creating User Profiles
Who is coming to your site? Why are they coming? What do they hope to achieve when they get there? When you have the client fill out the client survey many of the questions address the specifics of the intended audience. Demographics are important - a listing of specific information about your target audience should be gathered by interviewing the client. Demographics, however, only tell part of the story. Through interviews with the client, and users of the client's existing site, you can begin to create detail profiles of expected users. A user profile describes a particular type of user who you expect 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 can both 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:
Age range
Male or Female
Occupation
Salary range
Online experience (newbie, experienced, very savvy)
Online frequency (how many hours per day? Per week? Per month?)
Online location & activities (at work or at home? What do you do at work vs. at home?)
Connectivity (modem, DSL, ISDN, T1)
Types of sites visited
Online purchases per month
General vs. Specific
User profiles can be generic or specific, depending on the type of information you are able to collect, and the amount of time you are able to allocate to creating the profiles. General information is basic, starting with demographics including age, occupation, salary range, online experience and connection speeds. A general profile gives you an idea of the type of person you are targeting. The more specific you can be -- who they are, what they do for a living, what their environment is and what they do in their spare time - the more targeted your site design, navigation and content will be. Gathering specific information will help you create actual profiles of typical users.
Generic: "Typical user is male/female between 25 -40 years. Highly educated very computer savvy. 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. Avid reader, reading between 1-3 books per week (both fiction and non-fiction.) Favorite sites include Amazon and Half.com. "
Specific: "Liz is a 34 year old Ph.D. professor, 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 is an active online user and very used to purchasing, conducing detailed searches, and researching online. At home, she is 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 is an avid reader and often searches through online music and book stores, such as www.half.com and www.amazon.com for personal items and gifts."
Creating User-Scenarios
Understanding the user-- demographic info, goals, and habits -- is a keypart of developing user-profiles. Now, we need take it a step further and begin to identify actual situations or scenarios a typical user might experience in on a typical day as he or she attempts to achieve different goals on the site. The user profile describes the user, and 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 and determine if he wants to download a sample clip. Whatever the situation, it is important to think about the user, the task and the situation in order to truly gauge the optimal path for the user to follow.
General scenario/task:
"Kathleen is a busy executive who hasn't had a vacation in 3 years. She is 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 has heard there was excellent rafting trips in Costa Rica. She comes across several sites. After browsing a few and trying to determine which one might be a good fit, she selects one, www.away.com and begins to explore, search and gather information. She searches for "costa rica" and is given several choices from horseback riding to rafting. She narrows her search to rafting and has a list of a dozen or so to choose on based on duration and activity. She calls the 1-800 number and is able to speak to a live customer service representative who can see she is on the costa rica page, which is impressive. Mixing online offerings (ticketing, booking, airfare) with offline offerings (customer service, phone numbers, etc.) are helpful for this business person and add to the overall experience."
Examples need not be complex; they should just be "real." Even a conversation or two about a typical user and his needs and experience with a site is valuable for the team to assist in creating the ultimate user experience.
Discovery Summary
The value of the discovery phase is allowing the development team to wrap their heads around 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 -- first-hand. When the discovery process is complete, your team should have a clear picture of the target audience(s) and their motivations, and the competitive landscape - what other companies are doing that are successful and why. Budget or no budget, conduct some sort of initial research. For teams requiring additional information regarding functionality, features and other in-depth information - this is just the beginning of the discovery process. The gathered information will enable your team to focus on the site from a user's perspective instead of a developer's point-of-view. Allow the team to conduct research as their expertise and comfort-level allow, while the project manager creates the project plan outlined in the next section: Define
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