Overview

You know whom you want as your ideal target audience, but do you know who your real users are? You may know some things about which parts of your site are being used and what kinds of issues people complain about. These things may even point to the fact that your actual audience is the people you want, but how certain are you?

Qualitative techniques such as focus groups, think-aloud usability tests, and contextual inquiry give you insight into why people do the things they do when using your product, but they can't accurately outline the characteristics that differentiate the people using your product from the population in general. Only quantitative techniques can predict how many of your users are teenagers or whether they desire the new features you're considering developing. Knowing your audience's makeup can tell you on whom to concentrate your qualitative research and, more important, can give you information about what qualities define your audience.

Who is using your site? Are they the people you had built your site for, or are they completely different from the people you expected? What do they value about your service? Is that what you had anticipated, or are they using your service for something else? Unless you can get the opinions of a large section of your audience, you won't know what makes (or doesn't make) your product popular.

The best tool to find out who your users are and what their opinions are is the survey.