Usually, you can't design a web experience that serves everybody all at
once. Well, unless you're Google and the entire population of the
planet is doing pretty much a single set of things on your site. But if
you're not Google, or even if you are, you probably need to define
"segments" of users and customers so you understand who you're
designing for.
Big marketing companies divvy up customers into dozens of different
household segments, with cut nicknames like "Spouses & Houses,"
"Trucks & Trailers," "Soccer &
S.U.Vs.," "Savvy Singles" etc But these segments may not make
sense for your web site
or
even your business. For instance, several colleagues who run various
retail and
business-to-business web sites tell me they've have noticed there are
different segments of customer behavior even if everyone on their sites is a "buyer":
Some
customers buy from lists they keep, some others have jobs that involve
a lot of
reordering of the same stuff, still others who come and browse for
specials for what's new,
etc.
A lot of times, the personalities and job descriptions of
the users affect what they need to do on a site, what missions they are
on when visiting you on online. That's a different kind of segmentation
than you might traditionally use for direct marketing. If you're
lucky, you may even have an idea about what these segments of users are
and which of your segments are most strategically important or which
generate the most revenue or profits for you (especially true in retail
where buying cycles are have fewer touchpoints.)
For web design, it often makes sense to define segments of site users
according to either their job role or the specific activity they do on
your site. These two things are often connected, and it's no surprise a
typical purchasing manager performs similar tasks on your web site to
other purchasing managers... while other categories, say, journalists,
are on different missions and use the sites much differently.
One of the first things you can do is tap into the knowledge you
already have of types of visitors to your sites, to come up with rough
audiences and "user segments." Then test your knowledge with some
formal or informal field work. At Sun a couple of years ago, we started
with audiences we already knew, which mapped to job roles (Developer,
System Administrator, Purchasing Manager, IT Architect, etc).
For instance, folks
who categorize themselves as "system administrators" are a loyal and
knowledgeable group. We though we knew SAs pretty well, but to
understand their web needs better, we went on some visits to their
workplaces, had lunch with lots of SAs when they were visiting Sun for
training, and also invited a couple dozen SAs to Sun just to show us
the kinds of work they typically do on the web. Then we watched and
listened and found a lot that surprised us. We captured this basic
knowledge in a "profile sheet" that describes a canonical SA and that
person's typical work and what they need from the web. We've used these
sheets (and supporting scenarios) over and over whenever we look at
tinkering with the SA areas of our web. And we update them pretty
regularly.
More informally, when we wanted to understand how to improve the press
area of the site (see pic), we started by trying to understand
journalists jobs. Since we didn't have time or money for a fancy
ethnographic study, I simply went down to JavaOne and interviewed
twenty or so reporters and producers that were there covering news, and
then supplemented this with some usability studies and interviews about
the web site with journalists. At the end, though observation and
interviews, we had a pretty good idea of the needs of all journalists
(they're all on deadlines and they need to find your info fast), and
also began to get an idea of subsegments and their special needs (TV
field producers do a lot of the legwork and will use the web site
before going out on a story; general media reporters need the basics
available to them so they can explain complex tech topics in short
headlines; etc.)
Why bother with any of this? The reason is that if you can understand
the tasks and frustrations of your key audiences and subsegments, you
can design a much better experience for them and they will become
better customers more quickly.
This all relates to my posting from earlier this week about the
redesign of some of our product pages for the Opteron-based servers and
workstations. We did similar basic work to discover the information
folks need when they're buying or researching products, and you see a
lot of it incorporated into those new product page designs.
As we've progressed, we've gotten smarter about our segments and
realized that subsegments within the same group often may need much
different things. For instance, newbie SAs have much different
information needs and expectations that seasoned fellows who've been on
the job 10 or 15 years. New customers tend to have different sets of
questions about products compared with existing customers who know your
product lines.
While you may not actually go to the trouble of creating profiles and
personas*, it's important to know your site customers well enough to
design for the key segments and subsegments of your visitors. Do you
know who yours are?
Cheers.
* The profiles mentioned here are different from true 'personas" (which we also use and which I'll post about some other time), but the idea is the same: Put a human face on a set of site needs and document it on paper so everyone on the design or marketing team is reading from the same book, so to speak.
