Planning a Web Project
Planning a Web Project
In this article:
Audience Analysis
The Web is no different than any other communication medium. Knowledge of your audience is essential to planning and designing a successful site.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide complete instructions for conducting research to do a full analysis of your audience. However the following list provides some general guidelines of characteristics you should be able to identify about your audience before you begin to design the website:
- Level of general education
- Subject matter knowledge
- Your users' technology
- Roles within the field or industry
- Language requirements
- Accessibility restrictions
If your project is like most, you won't be able to pinpoint any characteristic across the entire audience. For example, your audience may range from moderately to highly knowledgeable about the information you are providing.
Audience Segmentation
The next step after defining these ranges is to segment your audience based on the characteristics that you think are most important. You might consider a matrix like the one below to help analyze the range of users within the context of the information you are providing. The following diagram is based on a fictional website which provides free information to an academic research community. It divides the information into three broad categories, reflected on the y-axis. The range of users' subject matter knowledge is on the x-axis.
The site planners predict that their most knowledgeable users will probably not access background information, whereas users with low subject knowledge will access background information frequently. They also predict that the full range of users will want to access archived articles. The audience range matrix is useful because you want to optimize the site for your different users. The matrix can help you decide how to organize and define relationships in the content you will be hosting on the website. Content that will be heavily accessed by all the audience segments should have more exposure than content that will be accessed by a lower percentage of users.
As you did with the project's objectives, it is a good idea to briefly outline the audience segments and their primary characteristics on paper and make them available to everyone who will be working on the site. If you are producing the site for a client, confirm the audience segments with their representatives.
It is also a good idea to prioritize the audiences. Ideally, you want to the site to serve the range of users that will be coming to it, but you may need to make design decisions that optimize the site for one type of user or another and it will be useful to have those priorities laid out before you begin building the site.