Audience analysis

The field of web design is primarily one where the sender and the receiver aren't working simultaneously to relay the message. This makes the sender's understanding of the audience crucial to the effective communication of ideas over the web.

In the philosophe.com post "Categorizing Your Audience," the author examines various ways of breaking the audience for a web page into categories for further study. These include function (which users use which functions), role (to what level to users interact with the site), knowledge/experience (self explanatory), and technical similarities (what is a given user's client-side work environment). The article provides a number of issues with each style; shortcomings and potential pitfalls that arise from under-analysis. It becomes fairly clear that the best way to reduce these problems is to create multiple divisions and categories and examine how they interact, and to focus on categories that become apparent from observations rather than categories that are expected before observation.

In "Eye Tracking and Web Design," Christi O'Connell shows a base commonality in the way users look at web sites. Users will look in what is described as an "F" or "E" shaped pattern, looking down the left and occasionally looking off to the right as they deem necessary. Designers can use this to their advantage by placing the most important information on the left side of the page, or circumvented by making multiple columns and thus the invention in the user's mind of a second "left," if you will. Additionally, users generally ignore anything they perceive to be an ad (which in addition to creating a predicament for ad designers) also can cause problems for web designers if their elements are not carefully selected. This design consideration is evident in sites such as Facebook or Gmail which place their primary navigation along the top and the left side. In the same vein, I am led to wonder if, in countries where written language runs right to left, such as Japan or Israel, it works in a reverse, with readers focusing again on the top but now on the right side instead of the left.