Pat’s Point of View

There is a difference between your target audience (who you want to reach) and your user-base (who actually uses your website). At least that’s the mental model I’ve always used when approaching web design. Let me explain, using a nifty Venn diagram:

The following notation goes with the diagram:

A = population of all web users
B = your target audience
C = your user-base (users of your website)
D = target audience using your website (B∩C if you’re a math geek)
E = target audience not using your website (B \ C)
F = users who are not in your target (C \ B)

This model provides a good platform for discussing strategies and tactics for a website. For example;

• If F is big you might be targeting the wrong people. Or your content is attractive to people other than who you want to attract.
• You generally want to shrink E and F and grow D, such that B and C become much more aligned. That is, the people using your website match your target audience.
• To shrink E (the people in your target audience who don’t use your website) you don’t have to spend money on marketing! You can create good content that attracts them, or to put it another way, “use SEO”.
• And, following on from that, if the content and functionality are well crafted you won’t grow F.

This last point is an interesting one, and it’s something that isn’t necessarily clear to some in this industry.

Case in point, I was recently involved in a conversation where a website owner told me her organisation didn’t know who their audience is. Not just their users (C), but their target audience (B)! The distinction between the two, as “my model” above describes, is that people actually using your website are at most a subset of who you’re targeting (at worst they’re completely different).

The fact that these two groups are different isn’t uncommon, nor is it unusual to not have a good idea of who the people using your website are (you might have analytics that tell you what they do but still not know anything about them). But it’s kinda scary to not even know who you’re targeting—who you’re trying to communicate with—other than “people who use the web”. This is wrong on so many levels! How are we supposed to create useful content for that? How are we supposed to design an effective user experience for “anyone”?

So, I guess it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise after that, when there seemed to be no recognition that there are people out there not using the site who could be. This gap between users and target audience is full of your potential customers (E). These are the people who you can “win”. So how do you do it? I thought it was logical, you create something those people want. Quite literally, if you build it (good content), they will come.

I was told that trying to gain more users (grow E) wouldn’t happen because there was no budget for marketing. OK, but wow about just creating better content?! Do a bit of research, find out what that untapped vein are interested in. I may be delusional but if you have to spend big on marketing to trick people to use your website, there’s nothing worth using on that website. OK maybe that’s a bit harsh but you catch my drift. Marketing can help, for sure, but it’s not the only answer nor is it the most direct solution.

Thoughts?

I will be speaking at Ark Group’s Strategically managing intranet developments conference from March 2nd to 4th, on the topic of Re-engineering your intranet with user-friendly architecture. To quote the brochure:

This session will take a case study approach outlining projects undertaken by Patrick Kennedy for clients within Australia

• Assessing user psychology: identifying needs and analysing behaviours
• Streamlining processes to simplify work flow and usability
• Personalising the intranet experience by creating user centred design

Hope to see you there!

More than likely your content management system (CMS) will have many usability problems if you just use it “out of the box”. Having been involved in a number of projects tasked with implementing a these types of systems—including content management systems for websites, intranets and wikis for knowledge management—I’ve noticed that there are a number of key areas of the user interface that frequently need fixing from a usability point of view.

All the usability tips you see here link back to general usability principles, and they apply to any software package or web application, it just seems that they are an issue in most CMS implementations.

Use these tips to improve your current CMS or to help you when implementing a new one.

1. If in doubt, leave it out

The user interface should be devoid of everything that is not necessary in terms of users completing their tasks. Most CMS products will have capabilities in excess of what is being used, but don’t show it if they don’t use it. And many products will have optional extras and upgrade possibilities, so your version might not have all the bells and whistles. For better or worse, some vendors will leave a stub to these missing features (possibly to help encourage up-sell). Don’t show it if they can’t use it.

Use CSS to hide stuff if you have to, but clean up that interface. We’re talking about main navigation, links, and irrelevant details spat out by the system. This also applies to words; as Steve Krug said “Krug’s third law of usability: get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half what’s left”. Each page title, sub heading, button label, navigation label, form field label, icon and graphic should be useful and meaningful, clearly communicating what it should.

(more…)