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User Experience - Lesson 2The second most important aspect of designing your e-business website is determining who the intended audience will be. Many sites fail to take into consideration who will actually be using the website. This begs the question, "How can you design an effective website if you don't know who is going to visit it?" Defining the user experience up front will help you establish a clear understanding of your audience, and this could lead to an understanding of how users will react to your website. Audience DefinitionWhen considering who your prospective audience would be, it is useful to put together scenarios or stories to help visualize the audience. Consider a more general rather than specific group. The audience would not be defined by the kind of technology used to access a site. A true definition of your audience would consist of who the users are and their goals and objectives. When considering whom your audience would be, discuss the possibilities with others including the same people you would use to critic the finished product.The list of intended audiences you have created should be used as the basis for a list of all possible audiences. Add to your list if possible and categorise them if you can. Take for example a website that sells bicycles. The audience categories might be buyers, sellers, manufacturers and other. The buyers category would consist of people looking to buy a bicycle immediately, those who might need one in the future, and people researching bicycles but are unsure of wether they will buy a bicycle. Rank your audience groups in order of importance. Discuss the list and write down the needs and goals for each audience. Collate these results and create lists of goals and needs for each audience, then rank the importance of each need and goal for each audience. You now have an audience definition list. ScenariosThe final step in defining the user experience is to create scenarios. You will need to create stories that describe how users may experience your e-business website. Scenarios are an invaluable tool in helping you visualise the site and its users. They are also useful later on to validate the site's design. Ideally, your scenarios should match up with the actual design of the site.From your list of audience definitions produce a set of users who you feel will represent the majority of your website's visitors. Then for each user write a scenario. Here is how you go about creating scenarios: Create a character for a user and give him/her a name, a background and a task to accomplish on the site. Create the task based on your list of audience needs and goals. Now write a story about how the character uses the site to complete the given task. Typically, three to six scenarios will be sufficient. Creating scenarios isn't difficult, and it can be a lot of fun. Be creative, you never know what weird and wonderful ideas you can come up with! Be careful though, it is easy to spend vast amounts of time in this area. The Design DocumentNow that you have identified a target audience for your e-business website,
you should create a new chapter in your design document called User Experience.
Add to it a summary of and the actual audience definition list you have generated.
After this you can include all the scenarios you have developed.
2.2 Scenarios |