The Importance Of Understanding Your Audience When Building A Website

When building a working and converting website for your business, it is now becoming more important than ever to create a satisfying and successful user experience. A focussed approach to your web development and digital strategy should be taken seriously or undertaken by people who know what they’re doing.

User Experience or UX Designers put a lot of effort into understanding keyword and site taxonomy. UX is about analysing real data and talking with real users to piece together seamless application or website.

Talking and understanding how a user interacts with certain tools and devices can provide you with content expectations, browsing behaviours and especially keywords priorities. The outcome of this type of research can be used to determine your site and page structure or information architecture (IA).
An interview with your users is always bound to provide plenty of insightful surprises! The typical interview process, undertaken by a Quality User Experience Agency will usually involve the following:

1. Research / understand the background behind your user's processes - their significant commercial or personal routines.
2. Bring a user into an interview environment that is relaxed and non-threatening.
3. Discuss the user’s global processes with them. Review their main needs and expected outcomes.
4. Narrow in on the processes that involve possible interaction with your company/organisation.
5. Record significant phrases they mention during the discussion about their processes and offer alternatives to see if they are given equal priority.
6. Run through typical online tasks that users may perform.
7. Understand their UI language level - how comprehensive is their understanding is of widgets and interaction features?
8. Review their content expectations - what features do they want to see and how do they want it presented?
9. After the interview

• Summarise and rank keyword use
• Remove non-business specific phrases
• Confirm content expectations
• Identify target/required content and site features
• Create an initial information architecture/IA
• Create ideal user journeys
• Refine the information architecture

This interview process needs to be flexible to accommodate for different user types. If your users are highly specialised (such as doctors, lawyers or engineers), then your background research will need to be a little more extensive.
If you’re interested in ensuring your site’s IA is up to scratch in 2018 or your just starting to think about a new site or application, its worth taking User Experience seriously and talking to a certified Digital Agency.