2 People! People! People!
To create a web site that communicates well, you must think about the people you are communicating with. Understanding your audiences and what they need is critical to deciding what to write, how much to write, the vocabulary to use, and how to organize the content on your web site.
We all interpret as we read
People aren’t just passive receptacles into which writers can pour information. We are all constantly interpreting what we see on the screen in light of our own experiences and expectations. Even when we think that we share the same language, it isn’t entirely the same. We may not know the same words. We may have different meanings for the same words.
Successful writers focus on their audiences
Writing successful web content doesn’t start with typing words. It starts with finding out about your audiences and their needs.
Understanding your audiences will help you write the content they need in the words and the way they need it.
Understanding why your web users come will help you select and organize the content so that it best meets both your goals and theirs.
Seven steps to understanding your audiences
The rest of this chapter gives you seven steps with lots of tips for getting and using information about your web users and why they come to your site:
1. List your major audiences
One way to list your major audiences is to ask: “How do people identify themselves with regard to my web content?” For example:
Another way is to ask: “What about my site visitors will help me know what content the web site needs and how to write that content?” This may lead to listing your audiences as
Notice that when I list these user groups, I’m always referring to people – to human beings. Don’t get caught up in naming departments, institutions, or buildings as users of your site.
Don’t say that you are writing for “Finance.” “Finance” may be a department with many people who have different jobs, different knowledge, and different needs from your web site.
Don’t say you are writing for “banks.” The bank is a building and buildings don’t use web sites. Are you writing for bank executives? branch managers? tellers? customers of the bank? Those are all different audiences and the differences may be important. They may be looking for different content on the site. They may know or not know specific vocabulary that you want to use.
2. Gather information about your audiences
You can start to understand your audiences by thinking about them. But that’s not enough. To really understand who they are, why they come, what they need, and how to write web content for them, you have to know them and their realities.
If you write your web content only on what you think your audiences are like, you will be writing from assumptions. If your assumptions are wrong, your content won’t work.
Here are several suggestions for finding out about your audiences. Try to do them all; the ones at the end – actually watching, listening to, and talking with your web users and potential users of your site – are the most useful of all.
For information on many techniques for understanding your web users, see Courage and Baxter, 2004.
Designing a good survey is not trivial. A good book on survey design is Dillman, 2007.
For ideas on watching, listening to, and talking with people at their work, see Hackos and Redish, 1998.
For information on contextual interviewing, see Holtzblatt, Wendell, and Wood, 2005.
For information on the critical incident technique, see the Wikipedia article on that topic.
3. List major characteristics for each audience
As you find out about the people who come (or should come) to your web site, list relevant characteristics for each of your user groups. Here are some categories to cover:
Key phrases or quotes
If you asked your web users what they want you to keep in mind about them as you write to them, what would they say?
Experience, expertise
Consider your site visitors’ experience and expertise in both the subject matter and in using the web. You may have differences here for different user groups. (You may also have a range of experience or expertise within a user group; note that, too.)
For example, for a travel site:
| Experienced travelers | Probably familiar with other travel sites; probably know how e-tickets work; may know airport codes of places they travel to frequently; want fast ways of working – probably need little explanation at each step |
| Occasional travelers | May not be familiar with travel sites; may not know how e-tickets work; probably do not know airport codes; may need explanations at each step |
For example, for a health information site:
| Researchers and health care professionals | Probably know the medical terminology |
| Patients | May not know the medical terminology
• Some may want to get the information without ever learning the terminology
• Some may want to learn the terminology to talk to the doctor |
Emotions
In some situations, people’s emotions are important user characteristics. Your users might be
In Chapter 6, we’ll consider writing for injured workers who are checking on their worker’s compensation claims. What would you say about their emotional state? Did you say: Anxious, nervous, skeptical about whether the agency really wants to help them?
If reporters are one of your audiences, what would you put down for them? Did you say: Deadline-driven, impatient?
What about people seeking help with a product problem (like a paper jam in the printer)? Did you say: Angry, frustrated, anxious?
If the web site focuses so strongly on marketing messages that information about customer service is hard to find, will that only frustrate these web users more? If your content about the problem is in convoluted, technical language, will that only make them angrier? And what will they do if the web content doesn’t help? Call up – and cost the company more money? Write a scathing review on a “what should I buy” web site? Buy someone else’s product next time?
Web content for people who are angry, frustrated, anxious, or stressed has to be particularly clear and simple.
Values
Knowing what matters to your site visitors may help you decide what content to include and what to focus on or emphasize in the content. Knowing their values may help you understand why they don’t want to read much, why letting go of the words and writing in clear, conversational style matches their needs.
Technology
What resolutions are your site visitors working at? What speeds are they connecting with? How steady is their connection? Do they pay for every minute they are on? Are some people getting your web content on small screens – on personal digital assistants (PDAs)? on cell phones? You’ll want to know that as you make decisions about your web content.
Despite the tremendous growth of broadband, it is not universal. In many places, people pay for each minute of connection – they don’t have unlimited access for a monthly charge. Many users are still on slow connections and slow computers, including many home users, older adults, and even users in large companies and in organizations that can’t afford to update their computers regularly.
Technology changes so rapidly that any statistics I put into the book would be quickly out of date. So instead of numbers, here are some web sites you can check to track the growth of broadband and other technology issues:
Social and cultural environments
You should also understand where and when people come to your web content.
All of these characteristics might be important for you to consider as you decide what to say and how to say it.
Demographics
For more on older adults and the web, see articles at www.aarp.org/olderwiserwired.
Age may matter for your site. If you are writing content for a particular age group – for example, for young children or for teens – that will likely affect your writing style as well as the design of your site.
But age isn’t all there is to demographics. In fact, recent studies of older adults have shown how diverse the audience of 50+ or even 65+ is. Even within the older adult audience, you have to think about differences in computer and web expertise (aptitude), in feelings about the web (attitude), and in ability (vision and other problems).
Vision and other problems are not limited to older adults. In the United States, all federal government web sites and any site paid for with federal government money must be accessible to all. Many other countries also require attention to making web sites work for everyone.
For a list of accessibility requirements in different countries, see www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/.
4. Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks, and stories
From all your sources, gather lists of the questions that people expect the web site to answer, the tasks they need the web site to support, and the stories they tell about their experiences with your web site, with other web sites, and in relevant non-web situations.
As you gather their questions, tasks, and stories, don’t translate! Keep the users’ words. One of the most important parts of gathering information from your audiences is understanding the words they use to describe what they want and need. Then you’ll have their vocabulary to use in your web content.
5. Use your information to create personas
If you’ve done the first four steps in this chapter, you have a lot of facts about the people who will or should come to your web site. But it may be hard to imagine real people in the facts you’ve gathered. Do the facts seem dry? Do they lack “human interest” – a real sense of the people your web content is for?
Alan Cooper popularized personas in design. Cooper’s books are listed in the bibliography.
A great way to bring your web users “alive” for yourself and your team is to create personas.
For more on personas, see Pruitt and Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle, 2006.
A persona is an individual with a name, a picture, and specific demographic and other characteristics. A persona is not a specific real person; a persona is a composite of characteristics of many real people.
A persona brings together in one example the facts you’ve gathered from thinking about or, even better, watching and listening to the people who come to your web content. Your personas don’t have to be fancy. You don’t need to spend lots of time and money creating elaborate presentations. You do need to be true to the data you have to make sure the personas represent your web users – not you.
Figures 2-1 and 2-2 introduce you to Matthew and to Edith, two of eight personas that AARP focuses on in planning and writing their web site.
Figure 2-1 Matthew represents the younger, still working part of AARP’s audience. AARP is a membership organization that every American is invited to join at the age of 50. Used with permission.
What information goes into a persona?
Use all the categories of information you gathered:
Figure 2-2 Edith represents the older (but not oldest), retired part of AARP’s audience. AARP members range from 50 to 100+. Used with permission.
You may want to put the information in a different order. We usually start with demographics so that the persona has a specific age, family status, education, job, interests, income level, and so forth.
Also, we add
The picture and name are critical parts of a persona description. They make a user profile into a persona.
You know you have a good picture and a good name when they resonate with your web team. And that really happens: I was helping a team develop personas for a particular user group. They had all met with several people in the user group, although I had not. I had brought about 20 pictures with me of people of different gender, age, ethnicity, emotion in their faces, and so on. As soon as I spread out the pictures, they pounced on one. “That’s her!” they said. And they knew her “name,” too.
Be sure to select a name and picture that make the team respect the persona. Funny or cute names are signs of disrespect. You must have good conversations with your personas to write web content that will make good conversations with your actual web users.
You can buy or license stock photography, but many teams find that casual, personal photos are better than photos of models. Don’t use a picture of someone the team knows. They’ll find it too hard to talk about “Jack” if they know it’s really a picture of Lisa’s brother Mike. But photos of friends or family that the team doesn’t know often work well. Just be sure to have the person’s permission to use the photo.
How do personas work with a web team?
Personas become members of your web team. Figure 2-3 shows how one team keeps their persona in clear view as they work. They can turn to her and “ask” her what path she would take to get to information or how she would do a task in what they are developing.
Instead of talking generically about “users” for your web content, you start talking about your personas by name.
Figure 2-3 Marie Tahir (in the red blouse) and her colleagues at Intuit have Lindsay with them as they plan and develop their product. Used with permission.
Here are some ways that personas have become members of web teams:
“Users” yes or no? – a note on vocabulary
Pruitt and Adlin, in their book on personas, strongly advocate removing “user” from your vocabulary. They say not to talk generically about “users” – rather always focus on your specific personas by name. That’s a great idea for a specific web site or specific web content.
In this book, however, I need more generic words. You – my audience – are so diverse (I hope) that you are dealing with many different types of web content for many different types of people. The personas for your web content differ from the personas for other people’s web content. What generic words should I use?
You’ll notice that I am using “people,” “web users,” “site visitors,” and “audience.” I hope that all of those words work well for you.
Shortening “web users” to “users” bothers some people, so I avoid doing that most of the time. However, I prefer “user” to “reader” for most discussions of web content because people do not come to web sites for the pleasure of reading. They come to gather information. They “use” web sites; they “use” web content.
“User” emphasizes that people come with goals, with tasks, with questions. “User” helps us focus on the functional nature of web content and the need to help people skim, scan, and grab and go. “User” is not a pejorative word; it’s an accurate description of people interacting with web content. I hope that when you see the word “user” in this book, you’ll read it with the friendly meaning: “person coming to my web site to ask a question, do a task, or see what I have to say.”
6. Include the persona’s goals and tasks
The persona’s major goals and tasks for your site are an important part of your persona description. Figure 2-4 gives you an example for one of five personas developed by a web team that researches and reports on issues in agriculture and food production.
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site
Scenarios are short stories that give you a good sense of the people who come to your site, what their lives are like, and what they want to do at your web site. Scenarios give life to goals and tasks in the same way that personas give life to lots of data about your web users.
To understand how useful storytelling (scenarios) can be in developing useful and usable web sites, read Whitney Quesenbery’s chapter in the Pruitt and Adlin book.
Figure 2-4 The goals section of a persona – Curtis, Vice President in charge of buying products for a major grocery chain
Scenarios tell you the conversations people want to start
People’s stories are the beginnings of their conversations with you. Scenarios can be as short as the two sentences in the thought bubbles below or as long as the stories about Mark and Mariella on the next pages.
If you have developed one or more major personas for your site, you should have several scenarios for each of them.
Scenarios help you understand all types of users
You may also want to have scenarios for a few secondary personas. For example, if your main personas are frequent shoppers and casual shoppers but you also have investors and newspaper people coming to the site, you may want to do “mini-personas” for them along with their scenarios.
Do the mini-personas with scenarios in Figures 2-5 and 2-6 give you a sense of these people and their lives? Would they be helpful to you in creating web sites for people like them?
Everything on your web site should fulfill a scenario
Everything on your web site should relate to at least one scenario that a real user might have for coming to the web site. (You do not need to have actually written the scenario for every piece of content, but there should be a plausible one that you could write.)
If no one needs or wants the information – if there is no plausible scenario for the content – why have it on the web site? It’s only taking up server space and perhaps showing up in search results where it distracts people from what they really need.
Scenarios can help you write good web content
If your scenarios are based on watching, listening, and talking with people, they can help you
As you plan your web content, always ask: Who will use it? What should I keep in mind about them? What story (scenario) will bring them to this web content?
SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 2
Here are key messages from Chapter 2: