Methodology
Audience Analysis
- Why design for specific audiences?
- What audience expectations should you design for
- What audience Web skills should you design for?
- What technical limitations should you design for?
Content and Navigation Design
- Types of information and appropriate media to use.
- Redesigning (changing) Content for the Web
- Designing Topical Information sites
- Designing Process-based information sites
Cognitive Considerations
- Understanding how users use the Web
- Common misperceptions on Web pages and workarounds
- Adding structure to prevent Information Overload
- Designing for the User's Attention Space and
Attention Span
Creating a Style guide
- What are critical parts of a style guide?
- Determining which HTML standards to adhere to
(i.e. 2.0, 3.2, NHTML, IEHTML...)
- Creating templates to make style guidelines easy
to stick with
Why Design for Specific
Audiences?
The first question when talking about Web
Design is why design for specific audiences? We are, after all, trying to reach the
mythical 30 million people on the Internet, right? Wrong.
First and foremost, there is no way that 30
million people will ever care to come see most Web pages, because most people aren't that
interested in every single topic. Thus, the people that will be stopping by have probably
already pre qualified themselves by being interested in your topic.
Now if a person is interested in your topic, they
are probably going to at least try to assimilate the material on your Web pages. There are
4 main areas that can cause them to become less than enchanted with your Web site.
1) You don't design for their browser/system and
the page comes in as less than readable because of that design.
2) You don't speak their language. In this case,
language goes far beyond the French, or English or whatever. Language is also the jargon
and colloquialisms that is specific to each group within a language.
3) You offer them a confusing interface and they
don't have a clue as to how to get from Point A to Point B
4) While your website may seem wonderful to you,
it doesn't keep their attention long enough to get your message through to your audience.
As I mentioned in the last note, there are
different areas to consider when designing for the Web.
Technical Limitations
The first area are technical limitations.
Technical limitations include such things as:
- monitor size
- number of colors that a video card can handle
- browser version
Each of these are very important.
The number of colors is also important. We take
this one for granted way too often. While I'm willing to bet that most US folks that are
reading this from Home have a pretty High end monitor and video card, the average worker
at work, still runs on plain VGA, and the systems in other countries are also often VGA.
Now color problems aren't that obvious unless you have one of the older monitors and video
cards. Then many images start looking speckled instead of being a single continuos rainbow
of colors. This problem is most common with those neat textured backgrounds, which often
make things harder and harder to read.
Jargon
The next biggest problem is usually the use of
jargon or the excessive use of words that you are intimately familiar with but your
audience may not be. These are the trivial things that alienate your audience.
They don't just happen on computer pages either.
Try shopping for a big screen TV and see how much of the Web page you understand.
Confusing interface
Don't do frames nor fill with pictures
Lack of Attention
We have all heard that to keep people interested
in your Web site, you must have stimulating graphics, movement and ideally sound, right?
This is a myth. If people are interested in the coolness of your site, they will visit the
cool areas. If people are interested in the content, they will visit the content areas. If
all of your pages attempt to offer something to both of those audiences, you may do both
audiences a disservice.
A good rule of thumb when designing Web pages is
to figure out if the audience is "goal-oriented" i.e. needs to reach a certain
goal, or if they are just browsing. Browsers require a lot of stimulation, goal-oriented
folk, require less stimulation, just quick access to the goal. Any thing that gets in the
way of that goal (such as long slow downloading images) is a hindrance.
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