By Holli Riebeek 17 May 2001
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.
The simplest solution may be to create a separate website with an independent URL for each of the audience groups. For example, if you were to create a website for a hypothetical state-funded laboratory called the Water Quality Monitoring Laboratory, you might create one site for scientists from industry and elsewhere and a separate site for citizens who are concerned about the quality of their water. A third educational site could be set up for teachers and students.
This solution allows you to design each site based on the needs of each audience. Because the sites focus on the needs of a single group of people, they may be easier to use. Scientists would be able to find the amount of chlorine in the water on January 24, 2001 quickly because the site is designed for them and is uncluttered by other irrelevant information. Increased usability will make the sites more accessible to each of their respective audiences.
However, having more than one URL for your organization may cause some problems. Users might have difficulty finding the information they need if they access the wrong website. It is likely that most users will not realize that the organization has multiple websites. Further, if searches reveal all of the websites, it may be unclear that all represent your organization.
Many designers choose to focus their website on the largest segment of the audience, but provide links to information for other audiences. NASA uses this approach. The home page targets a general audience with an interest in space by featuring news stories about shuttle launches, the space station, and other current events. In the left navigation column, designers include a link entitled “NASA for Kids”. The link leads to a home page that is geared to elementary school-aged children.
This approach keeps the information all in one place so that it is easier to access than multiple sites, but marginalizes the second audience. Even worse, since the home page is designed for a general audience, students or other users who do not fit that audience profile may think that the site does not match their needs and may leave before finding the links created for them. If other audience types make up a significant segment of your users, a more egalitarian design might be more effective.
A login screen could be used to determine which user from which audience is viewing the site. Typically such sites have a home page that focuses on the largest segment of the audience, usually a general audience. At the top of the page is a request for users from the other audience segments to log in to the site.
Using this approach, the home page of the website for the Water Quality Monitoring Laboratory would show information intended for members of the community, the general audience. A prominent link at the top of the page would invite scientists and educators to log in. The first time a user logs in, s/he could be asked to provide information about her/his profession and purpose in visiting the site. After the user has logged in, the page would change to the home page designed for that user’s audience group.
This solution combines the usability of having three separate sites with the accessibility of putting all of the information in one site. This design also offers the advantage of allowing you to post information for one audience that you may not want to show other audiences. The educators’ section might contain quizzes and their answers, for example.
However, asking users to log in based on their professional affiliation may exclude some audiences. Parents who are not educators might want to see what their children are studying, or community activists might want access to the data available on the scientists’ page. Such users may be left wondering what is behind the login screen, or they may just leave your organization’s site frustrated that they could not access the information they needed.
Nielsen defines subsites as, “a collection of web pages within a larger site that have been given a common style and a shared navigation mechanism” (223). He advises that subsites be used to organize large chunks of information in a complex website. Subsites could also be useful to organize information for different audiences in the same website.
Farkas and Farkas seem to support this method of designing a site for multiple audiences. They suggest that the audience should be divided into segments and that appropriate links should be provided for each segment as is often done on university home pages (46). Combining this suggestion with Neilsen’s subsites, the links for each audience segment might be organized into subsites. Each subsite should have the feel of an independent website, but would offer users global navigation.
The website designed for the Water Quality Monitoring Laboratory using subsites might open on a very general home page that simply explains what the lab is and how the website is organized. From that page, users would be asked to select an audience group to enter the site. Each audience group could then have a unique home page designed to match the needs of that group. Content could be selected and written specifically for the user. Once inside the subsite, users could be offered navigation options to return to the initial page and select a different audience group.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency successfully uses this type of design. The opening page offers news and other general interest links. On the left navigation bar, a menu button gives users the opportunity to select a more specific audience group. When the user clicks on the button, a menu containing eight different audience types appears. Users can select from kids; students; teachers; concerned citizens; industry; small businesses; state, local, and tribal; and researchers. After an audience type is selected, a home page for that group appears. The subsites for each group are designed specifically for that audience, and therefore have a different appearance. The subsite home page for kids shows a brightly colored drawing of a clubhouse and a child playing with links arranged in the picture. The subsite home page for teachers shows a photo of an older woman surrounded by small children in a classroom. The links surround the photo, but are not part of it. The look and feel of each subsite is consistent from its home page to interior pages. Each subsite includes a link back to the EPA opening page.
The advantages this method offers are similar to the advantages of using a login screen. Subsites allow you to design a series of sites for individual audiences and keep the information in a single large website. However, subsites allow all users to access all information. No information is hidden from any user; the subsites simply provide an organization scheme while focusing the information on the needs of each audience individually.
Subsites may cause problems with situational awareness. Farkas and Farkas emphasize that users must be aware of where they are within the site to navigate successfully (151). This awareness, called situational awareness, is established through visual cues that indicate what level the page might be on (home page, first level link, second level link, etc.), and through the navigational interface. A user might easily attain situational awareness within a subsite, but s/he might have a hard time seeing where s/he is in relation to the entire site. If the user entered a subsite from a search engine, s/he might not even realize that the subsite’s home page is not the top-level page in the site. The subsite’s home page looks like the traditional top-level page, and except for a link to the opening page, the navigational interface provides no additional clues. Further complicating the problem, other subsites in the website might use different visual cues to help the user see where s/he is in the subsite. This lack of consistency may hinder a user’s sense of where s/he is in the site.
Each method of accommodating different audience types involves some sacrifices. No one approach is without drawbacks. The goals of your organization must be considered when deciding which method to use and which sacrifices to make. However, the benefits of including all of your users in your website outweighs the problems.
Environmental Protection Agency. Accessed May 15, 2001. http://www.epa.gov
Farkas, David K, and Jean B. Farkas. Website Design: Theory and Principles. In press.
NASA. Accessed May 15, 2001. http://www.nasa.gov
Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability. Indianapolis, Indiana: New Rider