Understand Your Target Audience

I am amazed when I come across a designer or a company for that matter that does not understand or know anything about their target audience. They make guesses about what the visitors to their sites are like but never really connect with them. I have found myself reminding the decision makers that they too are consumers of their own products. What would they like to see their website provide?

They will spend thousands of dollars to watch people in a controlled room during focus group sessions but does that really show what the target audience wants? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that focus groups have their usefulness however, I feel that as a designer, I get a better understanding about the user when I observe them in the market place. Watching for patterns and listening to customer requests and translating that into functionality on the web.

LiAnne Yu hit the nail on the head when she said…

“If you want to understand what motivates a guy to pick up skateboarding, you could bring him into a sterile laboratory and interrogate him… or you could spend a week in a skatepark observing him interacting with his friends, practicing new skills and having fun. Ethnography is observing people’s behavior in their own environments so you can get a holistic understanding of their world—one that you can intuit on a deeply personal level.”

— LiAnne Yu, cultural anthropologist