Know your Audience     Do You Know Me? : How To Design For Your Audience Monday, November 7th, 2005: 12noon Pacific Time   Knowing your audience is more than just copywriting and visual design: it's much deeper than that. Businesses sometimes think from their own context and can't step through the looking glass and view themselves from the other side as their customers see them, and as their customers think. Marketing departments use focus groups and surveys to research their customers' desires and tastes, but how does that translate into movement through a Web site or application? You want your customers to look into that mirror that is your web site, see themselves and fall in love.   Presented by: Laura Malone, Director, User Experience   Laura Malone leads the OnlineFocus interface design team in creating highly usable web applications that achieve clients' business and marketing objectives. Laura has over 15 years experience in communications media, and experience with a wide range of businesses from Broderbund to FedEx.   Among Laura's notable projects was leading the transformation of WebMD's cumbersome online benefit enrollment system into a state-of-the-art web application. Laura's development of a response matrix enabled her team to quickly analyze benefits management administrator interviews, ultimately resulting in the design of the current self-service tool, which has reduced HR call volume by 65%.   Speaker Notes How do you design for your users is a 2-part question:   Part one is about research. It should go without saying that in order to design for your audience you have to know something about your audience. The question is, how much, what, and how to get that information. Many companies are afraid to undertake customer research because they fear the cost and the time it takes out of the schedule. But research doesn't have to take a long time, and it doesn't have to be expensive.   Part 2 of the question is, once you know about your users, what do you do with that information. Now both of these are huge topics and I'm only going to be able to start to talk about them in this brief time we have today, but I hope to give you some information today that you can walk away with and use. Is research always necessary?   It's always helpful, but sometimes there are quicker ways to get the information you need than extensive interviews and field studies.   Someone recently told me that whereas amateurs borrow, professionals steal: Stealing, or reusing is definitely the cheapest route in the short run, but in some cases the consequences are more expensive than others. When is it better to ruse and when is it smarter to invest in the ground work of research?   Names and Labels Don't guess with names and labels- they are the hardest part to get right - much harder than navigation. This is especially true when you have multiple audiences. The Eskimos have 26 words for snow -- if you've heard this you've never forgotten it because it speaks so deeply what's specifically true to cultures and contexts.   What is help? Think about the different connotations of these words : Help, Get Info, Get Help, Support, Customer Care, Talk to Us, Self-Service, Concierge, Help Desk.   Types of Research Marketing research Market research guides decisions about things like product positioning, revenue potential, and target markets. Likewise, designers need solid design research to guide their decisions about the product's interaction and information design, and features and functionality. Surveys Demographics Segmentation Design Research In contrast with Market Research, design research focuses more on what users do - and what that tells you about what they want, although we do also ask people what they want; but we take it with a grain of salt. Extant Data Review Internal Interviews Customer Interviews and Observations Usability Testing Focus Groups How much research is enough? Ideally you want to feel that you can step into your users shoes and predict what they will want, feel and do.   Some questions you should be able to answer:   What do my customers want to do? What questions do they come to the site with? How do they make their decisions? (with facts, opinions, emotional resonance) How do they describe the problem to themselves? What is their prerequisite knowledge? Do they have the skills required to use the site? Design for your users' goals Your goals are tightly wedded to what you care about, and your users goals are what they care about. It's about what you want to tell the user - and it's about what they want to know. Bad web design is like bad car sales - the focus is on the product not on the person To create a site that your users will experience as usable, design with their goals in mind.   A "usable" site lets you do what you want or need to do efficiently and effectively in a way that is easy to understand - it's a combination of both concepts. That's what you are striving for and you won't achieve it unless you know your user. If you give this to your user they won't get frustrated and will be more likely to pay attention to your message. In short, usability supports business goals.   Register   Telesymposiums are free to join and your level of participation is up to you. Sit and listen or share your experience and expertise.   Register now         © 1996-2006 Onlinefocus, Inc. | Contact Us | A UCI Web Group Company. All rights reserved.