Knowing Your Audience

                Knowing your audience is one of the most important things you learn about in marketing. Who is your target market and what message are you trying to get out to them? With that information you can move on to design your product to best fit the needs of that market. With web design, things are a bit different. When designing a website you have to think of your audience in a different way. An audience for a website is anyone who will interact, view, read, navigate, search on, order from, submit to, download from, etc. (Philosophe). A website's audience is going to be hard to group into on specific category or target market because it is available and potentially useful to everyone in some way, shape or form.

                With that said, it is still important to have a specific audience in mind when designing your page. You have to think about what operating systems they will use, what browser they will use, and how they will read the information.  In the "Eyetracking and Web site Design" article, Christi talks about Nielson's eye tracking research. His researched showed that users read web content in an F-shaped pattern, starting at the top line and then looking down the page a little and then reading across the page again. After I read this part of the article, I realized that I am one of those users, which means that there are probable a plethora of other people who read web pages the same way.

            Another thing I found quite interesting was when the "Categorizing Your Audience" piece, talked about categorizing the users by role. Like I talked about above, people use websites for different things s when designing your website you must keep that in mind. The article categorized users like so:

USERS are people who employ tools (software) to accomplish tasks: calculating, comparing, finding, outlining, writing, designing.

VIEWERS are people who seek entertainment. They want to be surprised, seduced, led along a path. Their goal is the journey, not the end result.

READERS are that rare (but growing) breed of web user who turn to a website as they might turn to a novel or magazine article.

I found this a very helpful way to define the role of each person and help you really find your target audience.