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Webify Your Soul: Audience

Every book or article about Web design worth the paper (or electrons) it's printed on stresses designing for your audience. Good advice, but it's about like the old "Don't Get Sick" health plan, unless someone gives the reader some hints on who their audience is and what their audience wants, it's not going to help much. So, let's think about this logically. Your widest audience is not merely restricted to the Web audience. Remember, there are things called printers. In the same line of thought, just because they are visiting your site, doesn't mean they own or even have access to a computer. It usually means that, true, but WebTV and is one exception that exists right now. More exceptions are in the works. There are plans for pager sized devices with tiny digital displays that can be put in cars (the way GPS devices already work), and I wouldn't be too surprised to see such apparently moronic devices as WebMicrowave or Web ElectricRazor. About ownership of a computer, think on this, recent surveys claim that twice as many users log on to the Internet at work than do at home. In addition, there are all the K-12 programs, college computer labs, and public kiosks and cyber-cafes. To assume that your visitors will be sitting in the comfort of their home and wandering through your site with one hand on a mouse and the other on their keyboard is an assumption you can't afford to make, because people react badly to wrong assumptions (or so I assume).

Now, the 90's can be characterized, at least in part, as a public dressing down of all notions of sexism and racism. On the Web, there are a few other -ism's toward which you should be sensitive: platformism and browserism. I'll admit that it takes a lot of the fun out of design, and it must be added that you can get away with it under certain circumstances, but finding inventive ways to work around these -ism's and totally ignoring them are two completely different creatures. Each major browser has about a dozen different versions each with their own capabilities. Browser manufacturers are also very helpful in letting companies brand and modify their browsers. Put these together with the less common browsers and other client applications (or user agents) and you're looking at having to keep up with what more than 100 different browsers can and can't do. You may think you have the time and patience to dig that deeply into all of it, but, even if you did, you'd need a dozen or more different platforms and computers with maybe 3 or 4 monitors for each to really cover all the bases. You could do that, or you could simply learn to construct solid standards-based sites, adding only the toys and tricks that you are certain won't crash the visitor's browser or render your pages useless.

The next most important concept to grasp about your audience is what you can offer them. They're not at your site to help you out. They're there for totally personal and selfish reasons, and the second you do something like assert your superiority over them, expect that to be the second they backtrack out of your site or start looking for exit signs. If that's the reaction you're looking for, why not just claim to design Web pages and then save everybody the time and trouble? Hand in hand with inconveniencing them with your mastery of infinite frames or looping hidden background midi mutilations that even K-Tel would have to throw back, is the concept of download time. If the total load of your page is more than 50k, it had better be what they were looking for. If it takes a minute or more to load on a 28.8 modem, it had better prove the existence of God--not an intellectual argument that proves God's existence but an actual visitation. Of course, very few people will get to experience this visitation; most people are long gone by then. In short, count on your audience's attention span and frustration threshold to be that of a toddler.

That all sounds like very sound common sense advice, but you might be amazed at some of the sites I've started exploring. Then again, you might not. After all, if you're wanting to design sites, it's a pretty safe bet that you've been in that situation yourself. That's basically the first key to understanding your audience, understanding your own experiences and reactions when visiting the Web sites of others. If you find slow pages, pop-up message boxes and broken images annoying, you can be pretty certain other people will find them annoying as well.

The final part of understanding your audience ties in with understanding your content. Is it informative and engaging? Does it offer new information or at least a new slant on existing information? Has the spelling been checked? Have the links been checked? Is the text legible against the background? Are the layout, color scheme and images complimentary to the content and intention of the page? Is the navigation between pages clearly understandable? If the answer to any of these questions is 'no', then you're forgetting who your audience is and why they are there. In later articles, I'll go into ways to answer any 'I don't know' responses and how to fix the 'no's. For right now, stressing the importance of keeping these things in mind should be enough.