Of course, users won't come to your site unless the site also helps them
meet their goals. So you have to find out what your users want and need to do
on your site.
Traditional marketing techniques can help you identify general demographic
characteristics of your target audience.
Here is a sample market
segmentation (PDF) of the potential audience for a website about investment
securities.
However, you cannot accurately find out what users really want and need by just
thinking about it. It's not enough just to visualize users or to rely
on market segmentation studies.
The best way to design for users is to observe actual users in context. Go
to where they live or work. Find out what matters to them as they interact with
your site. Then you can have specific people in mind while you make design decisions.
Observing Users
- What do users want to accomplish? What are their goals?
- What do users do now? (Learn about task flows)
- What matters to users about their process?
- How should the design team respond? In other words, what should the team
design?
The University of Baltimore KidsTeam
was working on a digital library project for kids. They prepared this field
guide for interviews with other kids about how they did reading-based
homework (PDF) and how they found books to read
for pleasure (PDF).
Documenting What You See
Write down specific information about each person that you observe in a field
visit summary:
- Personal information—name, age, educational background, professional
experience
- Knowledge level—domain knowledge, computer and web experience
- Key findings—goals, needs, and what matters to participants about
their interaction with the website
Sample user profile field
visit summary (PDF) from a medical library website project
Sample complete field visit summary (PDF)
from a web-delivered IT infrastructure project]
Use an Online Survey
Confirming what you find through observation with statistical data helps to
make your findings more persuasive to site owners. And if you're headed
in the wrong direction, it's definitely better to find that out early!
Some online survey companies, such as harrisinteractive.com and zoomerang.com,
will host your surveys for you. Some of these companies may be able to help
you design your survey so that you have more confidence in your findings.
Making Sense of Your User Data
Personas
Personas are descriptions of a few archetypal users called personas. Designing
for a single persona focuses the design on all the users that a persona represents.
Personas help guide decisions about priorities in site features, navigation,
interaction, and even visual design.
Here is a persona, Steven
Merrick (PDF), created as part of a medical library site project, and some
personas (PDF) created as part
of a medical information site about erectile dysfunction.
The persona description should contain all the types of information you collected
about users: behavior patterns, skills, attitude, environment, and goals.
Task Flows
A task flow is a graphical map of the actions in a process.
Your task flow will show
- Inputs
- Outputs
- Decisions
- Processes
A standard alphabet of symbols has been developed for creating flowcharts.
Your goal is to structure your website in a way that helps your users accomplish
their tasks efficiently. You'll need to present information to the users
exactly when and where it is needed in order for them to accomplish each step
in their process.
Here are some sample task flows
