How to create website features for a specific target audience? Part - 1
If you have read my September 3 rd posting "How to define the target audience of your website?", you can very well read on. If not I would strongly recommend you to please go and read the same before you read any further down this article. As my mother would always say, you got to sit down and then stretch your legs if not, almost always, you would fall.
If you have read my September 3 rd posting "How to define the target audience of your website?", you can very well read on. If not I would strongly recommend you to please go and read the same before you read any further down this article. As my mother would always say, you got to sit down and then stretch your legs if not, almost always, you would fall.
Talking about my mother, she might be making snacks for evening tea now. Its 2 40 PM IST on Sunday here. But i am not with her so i miss the spicy Vada that she makes so well. Ok, lets leave vada for the time and talk about website features.
Once you outlined and made a fairly good idea about the characteristics of your audience, it is time for you to crystallize the insights into website features. Almost always, the scope document would only say that the audience likes to read and interact based on a subject or do certain things. It is upto the project team to understand the requirement and translate the same into web features or activities. Now, lets consider the user specific features which are ignored on most of the occasions as unimportant. Adding the user specific features would really improve the user experience. I can personally assure you that.
User specific features:
Lets take an example here. If the scope document says, the site should allow pensioners to pay online, what would be the implications? If we consider only the user here ie. the Pensioner, we can list out the following features for the site:
Who is a pensioner? It is obvious that we are dealing with Senior citizens around the age of 60 or even more. First lets consider their physical conditions. They are seniors, they may have fading eyesight, fading health and very little attention span. Based on these physical conditions the web site should use:
- Bigger fonts so that links and descriptions are clearly visible and understandable
- Uncluttered design to ensure that no other major distractions are present in the page that would take them to other services of the website. E.g., online payment pages should have only the links that is related to making payments and global navigation links to guide the user back to where he or she came from.
- Option to add any page to favorites. There should also be clearly explanations that will help the user to understand that by adding the page to favorites they can come straight to the payment page.
- Alias urls that may be easily remembered by anyone like nyt.com for newyorktimes.com
Just by considering the "Who" part of the target audience itself we can list out features that will make a lot of improvements in the user experience. Features suggested above are generic as far senior citizens are concerned. When we consider senior citizens along with their social and academic background, we may have to uncheck a few features and include a few others. The point here is to have a deep understanding of the target audience (TA). The clearer the picture of the website's TA, the easier it is for the website to engage with the users.
I shall be writing about including different activities in the website that would appeal to the TA in my next posting. So stay glued for Part 2.
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