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Think About the Process
Learn about users
A public Web site is available to everyone. But "everyone" is not necessarily the best definition of the audiences for your site. Think specifically about the people you want to attract to your site.
You almost certainly have customers you want to target, probably several different groups of customers. List those groups.
Decide on your target audiences. Sometimes it is useful to think of your target audiences by roles in relationship to the site. A classic division for e-commerce sites is "browsers" and "buyers." For another, targeted audiences might be divided by type; for example:
- researchers outside the agency
- researchers inside the agency
- other staff in the division
- non-research staff elsewhere in the agency
Conduct a task analysis
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
By working with users, you can 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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Related Methods |