How to Learn More About Your Web Site's Audiences (on the Cheap)
There are a number of ways to learn about your site's audiences. Many of them are expensive and time consuming - focus groups, interviews, and personas for example. Here are three relatively cheap and easy ways you can learn more about your audiences.
Utilize Your Site Statistics
Statistics provide a very useful glimpse into many characteristics of your audiences. Demographic details can tell you from where your audiences are viewing your site. Technical details can tell you what browser they're using. A content analysis can tell you what keywords they used in a search to find your site. Other useful tidbits include things like: from what page on your site they left, navigation paths they used to find content, which documents they downloaded, and if they were referred to your site by another site.
Looking at the top content (example below) in your site statistics gives you a clear picture of what pages are being accessed the most by your audiences. Knowing this can be helpful in understanding where you want to focus your development efforts.
Create Quick Personas
Personas take time and are costly, but they are extremely useful in fine-tuning your site requirements. If you don't have much time or budget, consider creating quick personas. More often than not, this activity will need to be conducted with the client or based on what you already know about the audiences. If you have access to a sample of the actual site audiences, all the better.
Start with the basics - Define each audience type and get a better understanding of their characteristics. Does their job force them to look at your site in a hurry? Are they in the field looking at your site on a mobile device?
After you've defined some characteristics, you want to elaborate on two major needs - what they, as the audience, want from the website, and what the client (or whoever is in charge of the site) wants them to get from the website. What are they ultimately looking for? News? Quick-facts? A media contact? What does the client want them to find? Resources? Knowledge-sharing opportunities? Ways to donate?
Once you've detailed the characteristics and needs, these points should map nicely to the services and content you need to provide. Look back through the list of needs and start jotting down your content and services. Will the audience be looking for news? Then you probably need a news section. Do you want them to share knowledge amongst themselves? Think of some services that could provide options for this - a discussion forum, a wiki, or a blog.
This type of activity will help you get a quick glimpse at what your audiences are looking for. In lieu of creating full-blown personas, addressing each audience by type can be a great way of narrowing down what you're offering.
Here's an example of this activity from a client meeting. You can see that it's easy to get creative when conducting this activity.
Personas take time and are costly, but they are extremely useful in fine-tuning your site requirements. If you don't have much time or budget, consider creating quick personas. More often than not, this activity will need to be conducted with the client or based on what you already know about the audiences. If you have access to a sample of the actual site audiences, all the better.
Start with the basics - Define each audience type and get a better understanding of their characteristics. Does their job force them to look at your site in a hurry? Are they in the field looking at your site on a mobile device?
After you've defined some characteristics, you want to elaborate on two major needs - what they, as the audience, want from the website, and what the client (or whoever is in charge of the site) wants them to get from the website. What are they ultimately looking for? News? Quick-facts? A media contact? What does the client want them to find? Resources? Knowledge-sharing opportunities? Ways to donate?
Once you've detailed the characteristics and needs, these points should map nicely to the services and content you need to provide. Look back through the list of needs and start jotting down your content and services. Will the audience be looking for news? Then you probably need a news section. Do you want them to share knowledge amongst themselves? Think of some services that could provide options for this - a discussion forum, a wiki, or a blog.
This type of activity will help you get a quick glimpse at what your audiences are looking for. In lieu of creating full-blown personas, addressing each audience by type can be a great way of narrowing down what you're offering.
Here's an example of this activity from a client meeting. You can see that it's easy to get creative when conducting this activity.
Conduct Online Surveys
Sometimes the best way to find out what your audience wants is to ask them. Surveys are an easy, and fairly non-intrusive, way to learn more about audience characteristics and needs. You can use surveys to learn about general characteristics of your audience - gender, profession, location, etc. You can also use surveys to pinpoint certain areas of your site. If you've just launched a new service and want to determine whether or not your audience likes it, develop a survey that asks very focused questions pertaining that service.
There are a number of free services you can use to create online surveys. Two of my favorites are Survey Monkey and Survs.
Here's an example where we used to survey to learn more about the specific actions of our audiences.
The next time you want to quickly and cheaply dig deeper into the characteristics and needs of your audiences, consider using one of these methods.
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Senior Information Architect
Matt is passionate about community service and, in particular, helping those in need through technology. An example: He taught underserved youth at a community center in Yonkers, New York, to...
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