Know Your Audience

BY adam brain
2010/08/03

Creating an engaging user experience isn’t about 3D flash and kinetics. Although those elements help wow your audience, they don’t really ensure any level of engagement. Take our website for example, those of you who have been following us may have seen our old website. At the time it was pretty nifty piece of flash. We wowed users with slick movements and lightning bolts, yes lightning bolts! As time passed the website just wasn’t performing the way we wanted it to. Alas the site was so 2005 and we needed to “live in the now” as our good friend Garth Algar would say.

As technologies change the all flash website still has its purpose but for us and our users it just wasn’t the case. We wanted to provide our users with quick access points to our creative portfolio and contact information. Creating great user experiences means giving the user what they want and need. Sure making things spin, pop, and fly around the screen may get us excited but is it what the audience is looking for? Users are looking for specific information and they want it fast. Mobile browsing and usage growth is testament to this. Content on demand whenever and wherever.

Today’s  users are also expecting some form of social engagement on websites. Facebook open graph, tweet meme, and social bookmarking are all norms, and almost every client wants them. The key is how you integrate them, simply adding these elements to any all content on your site isn’t the right approach. Of course Facebook would love for all of your sites content to be social elements. One may even venture to say they are on a mission to kill the website and bring everything onto Facebook.

Whatever platform or technology you employ be sure you know your audience. Build your digital property based on what your user is using and not what you think is cool. Know their platform of choice, browser usage, and connection speeds. This may mean creating multiple versions for mobile, and browser delivery but by having a handle on these key pieces of information it will help you deliver engaging content to your users on their terms.

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  • 19/08/10

    Sophannieta Nournim says:

    I agree with this. I catered my site (and sites I create for others with) to be very simple and just packed with dialogue. I found that most people who responded to my site did so through Facebook rather than through the site itself. I still raise an eyebrow at this. That social, niche concept is so important as I have been hosting a personal blog for years now but it started gaining consistent traffic flow when I niched my writing. Though blogs are entirely a genre of their own for digital identification. I suppose time constrained people want specific stuff that will load fast on their Blackberrys and laptops. RSS feeds for the win!