Learn About Your Users
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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.
Users & You
Thinking about users only gets you so far in designing a successful site. Your thinking brings out your assumptions about the users. You may need to verify or challenge those assumptions. 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:
- User's information needs and levels of knowledge about the subject matter
- ways of thinking about, grouping, and organizing information
- expectations about your site
- 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.
Techniques
Many useful techniques have been developed to get useful information from users and about users before you design a site. The following is an overview of data-gathering techniques, what they are, and how they differ.
| Usability Testing – | This technique usually has users come to your facility. It can be done remotely and the tester and participant can be in different locations. You observe actual behaviors and listen to user's comments. |
| Contextual Interviews – | This technique allows users to do their own work in their own home or work site. You can interview one to two users at a time. You observe and listen to actual behaviors in the user's environment with the technology they use. Interviewer and user are physically in the same location engaging in an informal dialogue. |
| Surveys (Online) – | Surveys are used to collect users' wish lists, experiences and opinions but not actually behaviors. You may get a lot of self-reported responses and these users may be located anywhere. |
| Individual Interviews – | These interviews can be face-to-face, by telephone, through instant messaging or other computer-aided technologies. Usually they are one user at a time and are good for self-reported attitudes and experiences. They do not collect actual behavior. They are rich in data because you can follow up on questions. |
| Focus Groups – | This technique involves small group discussions involving eight to 12 people and moderated by a trained facilitator. Usually everyone is in the same location. This technique is not usually good for actual behaviors but is a self-report technique. The discussion can be influenced by group dynamics. |
| Card Sorting – | This technique is used to form the information architecture of your site (i.e., grouping the content and information on your site). The technique can be done with cards or remotely with several Web-based applications. Each card represents a possible site topic or piece of content. |
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.
Then you can Develop Personas and Write Scenarios by using the information about your users and their tasks.
