Knowing Your Audience

Tired of playing guessing games with your potential site visitors? Who are they? What do they want from you? How will they use your site? Can you really provide them with what they are looking for? Do you need to revisit your organizations areas of expertise to meet the users' needs? And how do you make sure they use your site again and again? If only you knew, life would be so much better for you. Unfortunately, getting your hands on this kind of data is unbelievably tricky business.

But it can be done.

There is no well-established right or wrong way of doing this whole exercise. It is something that will differ from situation to situation but it should allow you to know what you need to know about your potential user.

Basically, there could be two kinds of users:

• those looking for subject-specific information that already exists on your Web site; and
• those seeking information of all kinds which may need to be integrated into your Web site depending on its scope.

You need to get the above right because the user is oxygen for your survival and, it is all about two-way communication. In order to know the limits of this communication channel you need to better understand the user group, and while not easy, your task can be simplified if you have some amount of interactivity with your target audience.

To know your audience you need information on them, either qualitative or quantitative.

Qualitative research is an open-ended method of acquiring information about the consumers' product requirements (what they want) or product perceptions (what they think about what you've got). While the variations are limitless, this type of research typically takes the form of focus groups, user testing, or e-mail feedback. While qualitative data is very accessible and often leads to never-before-considered results, it falls short in the realm of reliability and tends to be biased. Therefore, it becomes essential to interpret results while keeping in mind the context in which they were gathered.

Quantitative research is usually conducted via surveys or behavioural tracking (e.g., log file analysis). It's based on the principle that the characteristics of a randomly selected group of people will closely reflect the characteristics of the entire group from which the sample was taken. So, when site developers need to know, with relative certainty, the answers to specific questions, they should turn to quantitative methods of research.

The most basic, and arguably the most valuable, quantitative assessment that sites can undertake is gaining a thorough understanding of their users as people. You could get to know how old they are, their level of education, their income level, etc. While audience profiles normally contain information closely related to the census demographic profiles, they could be augmented with specific information like users' relationships with the site and how they use it. This could be really useful for getting accurate information about your user and the over all development of the site.

The human interface has become a very efficient tool in gauging what your user really gets ticked by. It lets you observe the user and then create a Web site according to his/her preferences.

For example, if you are a content developer and you know that a section of your audience is not as literate as the other, you could try and provide for an alternate more simply expressed version or a more graphics and voice enabled version for the user.

The challenge then is to be able to use the above information effectively to the best advantage of the site and the end user.

You have to start somewhere:

• Write for the reader and not for yourself or what you feel like writing about.
• Develop content that encourages people to go on and come back for more (e.g., if a site has information on agriculture, it should give generic information on soil types, cropping patterns, best practices, etc., but also maintain a dynamism by giving seasonal information relevant to the farmer at a given point in time).
• It should be something that can add to their knowledge and make them more informed (i.e., not just providing information but telling the user the difference of having that information which then makes it "knowledge").
• The keyword should by default then become "customization" of information to meet the user's needs.

Sure, on the surface, this kind of research can seem a bit dry. We, however, choose to think of it as an exciting quest for knowledge, a mission in search of truth and a journey that boldly goes where no human has gone before.

SD Case Study

Meeting the Needs of Rural Indian Users: TARAhaat.com
The data, analysis and communication structures of TARAhaat.com are carefully designed so that it can smoothly evolve in response to the felt needs of its users, making it a highly participatory and thus responsive network at all levels of interaction.