Who will visit the sites you build? What are their expectations? What kind of technology will they use to view you site? What will bring them back to see it again?
Answers to these questions will effect every decision you make about the development of a site, from the way navigation is labeled to how much multimedia is tolerable.
A site development team will go to great lengths to get answers they need to help define their site, including surveying focus groups, asking for online feedback of an existing site, paper surveys, and offering premiums/giveaways for the users’ time and effort.
Compare these types of audiences with the types of sites listed below. Do you see any similarities? Ilise Benun, author of Designing Web sites for Every Audience, lists 6 types:
- Learners
- Shoppers
- Connection Seekers
- Transactors
- Business Browsers
- Fun Seekers
Take a look at Reece, Rogers, and Sharp’s online tools for building a list of questions you may need to address for your project:
- Interactive Heuristic Evaluation Toolkit
- Reece, Rogers, and Sharp. Interaction Design web site.
For this course, you will make educated guesses about your audience (unless you have the time to really find out about your audience) and listen to feedback from your small groups to assess whether you site(s) meet your defined audiences’ needs.