Targeting Audiences, Targeting Priorities

By MATTHEW STANTON, stanton@journalinteractive.com
10/12/2002

Designers tend to label their target audiences by each mediums' method of delivery. Newspapers and magazines have readers, radio has listeners, television has viewers - all passive activities.

The World Wide Web differs in that its audience members are called users, people actively involved in making the medium effective and apt to think of the Web as much as a tool as a source of content.

Like all segmented audiences, Web users vary in what they want - one day sports records from 1933, the next auction bids on duck blinds - and the choice of where to start looking is staggering. As a result, search engines remain the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web not only for finding specific content but also revealing sites likely to feature closely related information.

This find-it-yourself habit doesn't end once the user picks a site - the user remains aware every competing site is just one click of the mouse button away.

The Web grooms users' hunter-gatherer instincts to sense when they are finding the right content and when they are heading off the correct trail. To track the metaphor further, experienced users tend to stick to proven fertile hunting grounds. Every Web site is a hunting ground with content as its game, and if the content herd grows too lean or hard to catch, the hunters move on.

Now, follow the metaphor deeper and consider how the mouse cursor looks just like an arrow, see, and... no, wait, that's silly. Nevermind.

The point is that designers have to make their Web sites attractive to Web hunters - and by "attractive," I don't mean cool Flash animations or stunning illustrations, although such things play a part. I mean designers have to ask critical questions about what their target audiences are looking for and, based on those tastes, set priorities for aesthetics, content, ease of use and speed.

The next four screens pose questions designers should be asking about everything being offered to their audiences. There are rarely "right" answers to these questions, but they help to guide the "content herd." Let's start with making first impressions...

>> Continue: Questions about Aesthetics...

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