Overview

Although a Web site is many things entertainment, advertising, information every Web site is also a tool. It's a tool to help people do something that, otherwise, would be difficult, time consuming, expensive, or inefficient. Even if the efficiency it introduces is merely a shortcut to something funny or interesting, it's still serving as a kind of tool. It's something that makes their lives a little easier. It solves some problem.

Tools solve problems, and to build the right tool, you need to know what the problem is. There are a number of ways to do that. You can guess, using your knowledge of the target audience and what they're trying to do. This is fast, but it's fraught with danger: if you're not a member of the target audience (which, as a developer, you rarely are), your understanding of the nature and severity of your users' problems will not be the same as theirs. You could decide that someone needs a bigger hammer, when in fact, he or she needs smaller nails.

Another method is to ask representatives of the target audience what their problems are, but this too can lead you in the wrong direction. People tend to idealize their needs and desires, and their statements often don't correspond to their actual needs and behavior. Many sites have been perplexed about why no one uses their personalization functionality after everyone in a survey said they wanted it. The reason is simple: ideally, people would love to have everything tuned...