Design process - part 2: Goals and audience

Posted on 22 March 08, in design, tutorials

This is part 2 in the series of articles I'm writing on my design process. In Part 1, I introduced this series and talked about my working environment. This 2nd part is about settings goals and defining an audience.

Wether you're designing a (commercial) website for a client or a personal site, like I am in this example, you will need to have some goals set beforehand, in order to know in which direction you'll be going/what criteria your design should meet. Along with setting these goals, you need to consider who your main audience is and define that group so that you know who you are going to address.

What's the site for?

When creating a design, the first question you need to ask is what the site is for. What's the site's purpose? Although this might seem obvious, sometimes it's hard to get a clear answer to this question. A client might tell you that 'Competitor X has a site, so we should have one too'. Quite frankly, that's not a very good reason. No well-thinking business will run an expensive advertisement campaign or hire extra staff, just because competitors are doing so, right? They might do these things to increase brand-awareness, improve client satisfaction or ship orders faster. Whatever the goal is, the point is that there ìs a valid a goal. Launching a website is no different. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. It's an investment of money and time (= money too), and like any other investment it should be clear what it is for.

Taking my own site as an example for this, the goal I've set for it was to serve as an independent platform where I, as a (web)design enthousiast more than anything, can experiment and write on the subject of design, the web, and whatever else comes to mind.

Is that the whole story?

If this really was my ultimate goal, I could experiment and keep a journal without actually publishing it online. I could even do this in the form of a website, whether for the sake of target-practice or just because I like doing so, without making it available for everyone to see. This way, my goal of creating an independent platform where I can write and experiment would be achieved without having to spend a shitload of time and – were I to be a client hiring an agency to build a website – money.

Question everything

I belief that part of our job as a designer is to question every aspect of a project in order to create clarity and direction. Questioning goals is a very important part of that.

As was described in the above, it became clear that I could achieve the goals stated by myself without actually publishing a website online. Yet, I really did want to launch my own site. This pushed me to consider what else, besides my stated goals, was driving my desire for having a website. Maybe I was holding back information, in a similar way that a client might do so, that contained a real or valid, but until now subconscious, reason for wanting a website.

So I turned the situation around and asked myself what I expected to get out of a website. Suddenly, all kind of 'new information' came out: I'd like people to actually see my experiments, to read my journal and comment on it, this way creating a conversation and maybe even provoke a discussion that both I and visitors could participate in and learn from.

Now that I had a clearer view of what I wanted to achieve, I could formulate a better goal for my website: to create a platform through which I can join the conversation on design and the web by sharing my own thoughts and experiments.

Although in the example of my own website, this process of questioning the goals took place in my head, it should be applied in a more explicit way when working with clients. It might seem obvious that a client would tell you, as the hired designer, what the goals of his website are, but a client doesn't always consciously or explicitly know what he wants. Since you're the professional, it's your job to dig deeper and find out before you start designing.

Who is the site for?

As stated in the introduction, you need to consider who your main audience is, and define that group so that you know who you are going to address. There are various ways of going about this, but the first and most common one is to ask the client.

As I am the client in this example, I will answer the question myself: my website has attracted mostly designers and other web-related professionals and hobbyists in the past, and this is the audience I want to continue to attract and interact with.

Getting to know your audience

In order to getter a better understanding of who your audience consists of, you can start by subdividing them into smaller, more specific groups. This way it will become easier to address specific needs of different kind of visitors to a site.

Taking it a step further, some projects demand you to create personas. So what are personas? Wikipedia has a good description available:

“personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software or online applications, in which the goals, desires, and limitations of the user are considered when designing the product. Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design”.

The best way to create personas in my opinion is to interview a few people within the subdivions of your audience. Don't bother talking to dozens, you are trying to get an understanding of common needs within your audience, rather than trying to pin down exactly who will be visiting the site. I belief that's not possible, since a 'typical visitor' simply doesn't exist. Everyone has his or her own needs and goals, and by trying to facilitate everyone at the same time, you could end up facilitating no one at all. I know that there's some well-know experts out there who disagree with that, so I do advice you to study some different takes on the matter before just taking my word for it :).

Personally, I did not dig very deep into the subject of defining an audience for this site. Which is not very smart, because I do have a goal that I want to meet and should have been thinking about who the site is for. By not doing this, I missed the opportunity to optimize the site and content for its specific audience.

Revisiting the topic now I've finished the site will not add anything to the process description itself, since any reference to a specific audience would be completely made up as I didn't have a specific audience in mind when designing. So I'll leave that out for now.

Resources

Again, I've got some resources for you that might help you when defining goals and audiences:

• Creating a site design plan
• Goal oriented design
• Personas, on wikipedia
• Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals

Join the conversation

So what's your take on setting goals and defining audiences? Got any interesting ideas or advices? Share them in the comments!