Determining the Group Size

Your target user group should be wide enough to make your product interesting for enough users so that you believe that your product can be profitable. How large a target user group should be will depend on your product, the target users, and the market situation.

Figure 3-3 illustrates the choice between a small and a large group. If you are designing a web page for customers in low-income countries, you may need millions of customers to make your business profitable. If you design a mobile device for oil billionaires, you may not need any more than ten customers for your product if you can achieve enough profit from each device.

Figure 3-3. Narrow or wide target user group?

At the same time, you generally want to keep your target user group as narrow as possible. Creating user experience innovation that will be successful for several millions of very different people is impossible. The reason is that you will end up spreading your focus and innovations too much. And you may also end up cluttering your user experience with hundreds of functions and technologies in an attempt to satisfy everyone.

So you want the size of your target user group to be big enough for your product to become profitable. And you also want your target user group to be small enough to actually be able to trigger some potentially successful user experience innovation. Like the shoes in Figure 3-4, there is no one, correct size.

Figure 3-4. One size does not fit all

If the marketing department in your company has already defined a target user group, you will, as a user experience innovator, want to review and challenge their choices if you can identify obvious flaws in their decision. You will also want to dig into the research material that they have. If your marketing team has defined “the world” as the target user group, you should probably ask them to go back and redo the research they have done so far.