Learn About Your Users
To design a site that works for you and your intended audiences, you have to know a lot about those audiences. They may be customers, consumers, researchers, or the public. Let's call them users because what you want them to do is use your site.
What do I need to know about users?
Verify or challenge your assumptions about users. Thinking about users only gets you so far in designing a successful site. Your thinking brings out your assumptions about the users. To learn about users' reality, you need to get out and meet them, work with them, and involve them in helping you to understand their:
- needs for information
- ways of thinking about, grouping, and organizing information
- expectations about your site
- levels of knowledge about the subject matter
- levels of experience with the Web and similar types of sites
- ways of working with information (how much they want to read, for example)
By working with users, you can also find out about the technology they have available to them: whether they are on broadband or dial-up, what resolution they typically use, the physical environment in which they work, and so on. You can also gather many realistic scenarios and learn what makes a Web site work or not work for them.
Let users help you build the site for them. Many useful techniques have been developed to get useful information from users and about users before you design a site.
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How can I learn about users?
The following is an overview of data-gathering techniques, what they are, and how they differ.
Technique |
Characteristics |
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Usability Testing
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- Users usually come to you.
- It can be done remotely; tester and user need not be at same location.
- You usually develop the scenarios.
- One or two users at a time.
- Total numbers: five to 12 users.
- You observe and listen to actual behaviors.
- May be formal or informal, quantitative and/or qualitative results.
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Contextual Interviews
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- You go to the user's home or work site.
- Users do their own work (different scenarios with different users).
- One or two users at a time.
- With individual sessions, typical total numbers: eight to 16 users per user group.
- With remote testing, typical total numbers: 30 users per user group
- You observe and listen to actual behaviors.
- You see users' environments and the technology users have.
- Usually informal dialogue with user, qualitative results.
- Interviewer and user are physically at same location.
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Surveys (Online)
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- May have large number of responses.
- Get users' self-report.
- Good for wish lists, attitudes, experiences; not for actual behaviors.
- Usually mostly closed questions (yes/no, multiple choice, short answer).
- May include open-ended questions, but they require more analysis.
- Users may be located anywhere.
- May be single-survey or iterative series.
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Individual Interviews
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- Face to face, by telephone, through instant messaging or other computer-aided technologies.
- One user at a time.
- Total numbers: usually five to 15 users.
- Rich data—you can follow up on questions.
- Can include both closed and open-ended questions.
- Self-report; good for attitudes, experiences, wish lists.
- Not good for actual behaviors.
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Focus Groups
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- Small group discussion, usually eight to 12 people per group.
- Moderated by trained facilitator.
- Usually everyone is in the same location.
- Self-report; good for attitudes, experiences, and wish lists.
- Not usually good for actual behaviors, but it can be combined with some aspects of behavioral usability testing.
- Discussion is influenced by group dynamics (for good or bad).
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Card Sorting
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- Usually used after gathering information with one or more of the other techniques.
- Each card represents a possible topic on the site.
- Need a start on content topics—so have some cards to sort.
- Can be done remotely with one of several Web-based tools; that allows for large numbers of responses but little understanding of why each person chose that response.
- Can be done as individual sessions; one or two users at a time.
- With individual sessions, typical total numbers: eight to 16 users per user group.
- With individual sessions, you can observe and take notes as users talk about what they are doing.
- With web-based tools, typical total numbers: 30 users per user group.
- With web-based tools, you can gather a great deal of data and can call users after the card sort to learn about how users sorted the cards into categories.
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Next steps
In addition to learning about your users, you should read the article about Conduct Task Analysis to find out more about the tasks your users do at your Web site.
Using the information about your users and their tasks, you then Develop Personas and Write Scenarios.
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