Self Sorting Audience

Problem

How do you direct the readers of the site to the information provided for them when you have multiple audiences using the site?

Context

Sometimes it's impossible to identify a single audience for a site. Occasionally it's critical that a site attract and communicate to multiple audiences.

Solution

Provide a top-level page that contains links to MultipleCrossSections of the site, one for each intended audience.

Resultant Context

Members of each audience can select the section they are interested in.

VisibleContext can be tailored to the audience.

The home page has a tendency to collect large images, and in this case there isn't much real content to provide worth. The user may get frustrated with the download time and the low content and assume the rest of the site is similar.

Related Patterns

The hub-page provides EasyOrientation for your SelfSortingAudience

Known Uses

Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com) home page contains links to subsections of the site for developers, managers, shareholders and so on.

The Javasoft (http://www.javasoft.com) home page does the same kind of thing.

The hospitals I mentioned in WebsitePatterns both needed to cater to four audiences:

Medical professionals
Patients (kids)
Patients' families (parents)
Internal users (admin and medical)

On the site I worked on, for a children's hospital, we had identified the first three and split the content along those lines, with some cross-over. The fourth group wasn't an official audience, but in the end was the most politically important audience.

Each of the audiences not only had different uses for the site, but also different requirements for tone and detail.

Our solution was to use the first ("home") page to let the users chose which audience they belonged to. Each of the three links ("Parents", "Kids", and "Professionals") led to a more traditional home page with focused content, look, and tone (a "hub page").

The other site added a link to "Departments", a link we held off until the hub pages. The "pre-sort" home page lets the designer focus the subsites on the appropriate audiences.

-- RobCrawford

(Refactored by NatPryce).

I'm not sure how to fit this into SelfSortingAudience, or whether it is a different pattern or should be documented as an AntiPattern. Anyway... I have noticed a lot of sites that ask users to be a SelfSortingAudience based on technological rather than content-based criteria. E.g: whether they have a Shockwave or Flash plugin, whether they have Java or are using Netscape or Internet Explorer. My hunch is that this is a bad idea. Do all users know what technologies are installed in their browsers. Should they care? About the only form of this I would consider good manners is to provide a high-bandwidth vs. low-bandwidth choice, but even then I think it is better to make sure your site is readable without images. What do people think? -- NatPryce

Ideally, the browser would tell the server what content it can accept, and the server would chose the appropriate content. That's possible to some extent now. -- RobCrawford

I'm not sure that's ideal. I'm just thinking of times when I want to travel a site quickly (i.e. without the fancy stuff) even though my browser can handle Java, RealAudio?, etc.) - But I like the idea of the broswer telling the site what to display. So perhaps what I want is various profiles to fit my mood, and to easily and quickly change profiles when I want to go slow or fast. -- JoshuaKerievsky

Sites organized in this way can be very frustrating to use. Notable offenders: vendors of computer hardware that want you to pigeonhole you, on the front page, as "Home" or "Small Business" or "Large Business" or "Enterprise". See http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cranky24.html for one person's take on this. -- GarethMcCaughan