admin | 
04 29th, 2006| 
To design a site that works for you and your intended audiences, you have to know a lot about those audiences. They may be customers, consumers, researchers, or the public. Let’s call them users because what you want them to do is use your site.
What do I need to know about users?
Verify or challenge your assumptions about users. Thinking about users only gets you so far in designing a successful site. Your thinking brings out your assumptions about the users. To learn about users’ reality, you need to get out and meet them, work with them, and involve them in helping you to understand their:
- needs for information
- ways of thinking about, grouping, and organizing information
- expectations about your site
- levels of knowledge about the subject matter
- levels of experience with the Web and similar types of sites
- ways of working with information (how much they want to read, for example)
By working with users, you can also find out about the technology they have available to them: whether they are on broadband or dial-up, what resolution they typically use, the physical environment in which they work, and so on. You can also gather many realistic scenarios and learn what makes a Web site work or not work for them.
Let users help you build the site for them. Many useful techniques have been developed to get useful information from users and about users before you design a site.
How can I learn about users?
The following is an overview of data-gathering techniques, what they are, and how they differ.
| Technique | Characteristics |
Next steps
In addition to learning about your users, you should read the article about Conduct Task Analysis to find out more about the tasks your users do at your Web site.
Using the information about your users and their tasks, you then Develop Personas and Write Scenarios.
