Know Your Audience

Problem

How do you tailor the content of a site to make the most impact on the user? How do you make your site as informative, persuasive, or useful as possible?

Context

All Web sites are communication tools. Communication directed at the wrong audience will probably fall flat -- what will persuade a teenager will seem frivolous to a 50-year-old parent of three, and vice versa. The graphical look, the writing tone and vocabulary, and even the navigation will be influenced by the intended audience.

Solution

In some cases, the intended audience is part of the site's purpose. If you're creating a site about the latest theories in ObjectOriented development, chances are the audience will be OO programmers, project managers, and theorists. If the site's audience isn't obvious from its purpose, see if the company has market research that identifies its customer base, or if there's a specific audience they want targeted.

Resultant Context

Once the audience is identified, the graphic artists know who to design for, the writers know who to write for, and the site's architecture can be appropriately designed.

Known Uses

Most sites that cover a subject have an audience in mind. The IEEE site, http://www.ieee.org, is for members and prospective members of the IEEE.

Related Patterns

Know your audience is a pattern for giving speeches, writing a book, in short, for communication. A Web site is just another form of communication. Q.E.D.

The argument had previously been raised that knowing your audience consists of (say) SoftwareDevelopers is still not sufficient to tell you what colour background they prefer or whether they'd like cartoons (or even, dare I say it, MacromediaFlash) with it.

I think it's a shame that the contributor of that argument subsequently deleted it. I'd still like to see it answered. -- DanBarlow