Chapter List

UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE

To start your entire web design process, begin by defining your audience. Who do you hope and expect to be visiting your web site? Define this as precisely as possible. This audience specification can be used for recruiting potential users for surveys and user testing, so the demographics should be clear enough to reproduce accurately. Define age, gender, income, education, occupation, computer experience, and anything else that would affect who you would recruit and how they would use your web site.

After your first brush at defining your audience, you need to do research on what your audience is really like and what they need. You can find statistics about your users from a wide variety of marketing resources including the Census Bureau, industry analyses, and online surveys. If the information is not available, you'll want to conduct your own surveys and user interviews. Even when information is available, you'll often need to develop a more detailed understanding of your users. This is especially true when you have a very specific target audience with specialized skills or interests, such as when you're developing intranet or extranet applications.

Why is it so important to talk to users at this stage? After all, we'll be conducting user testing later on. Early discussions with users are helpful because it's common to learn at this point that your assumptions about your users are wrong. You may learn...