Designing for Multiple Audiences

Select the Audience

One of the first steps in designing an effective website is defining the target audience. In his book, Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen admonishes, It is not sufficient to provide high quality content. The content must also be relevant to your users and the specific things they want to do (382). If you are to decide what sort of content is relevant to your users’ needs, you must first know who your users are.

David K. and Jean B. Farkas offer five general guidelines to help you determine who your audience is and what its needs are. They recommend that you consider the level of general education, subject matter knowledge, income, age, and values of your typical users (45-56). Specific knowledge about these factors will help you develop content and design pages that effectively meet the needs of your users.

However, it may not be possible to focus on a particular audience. Some sites are used by several audiences for widely varying purposes. For example, a state-funded research laboratory might be obligated to design a website that provides information to scientists, the general public, educators, and students. These audiences have vastly different levels of general education, subject matter knowledge, ages, and values. Further, users from each group come to the site with different expectations and for different purposes, even though they may want the same information. A scientist might be looking for raw data or experimental details while a teacher wants an overview of data and experiments to plan lessons about applied science. How do you, as a web designer, accommodate all of these users’ needs and still maintain a cohesive, manageable site?

Designers have approached this problem a number of ways. This chapter gives an overview of just four of the methods that could be used to include different audiences in a single website.

·Create a separate site for each audience group.

·Focus on the largest audience but include links for the other audiences.

·Request that users log in to bring up the site most appropriate for them.

·Include subsites for each audience.

 

abstract, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, works cited

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