Datasheet

beginning to end. We can explain what we’ll be building, and what kinds of deliverables we will pro-

duce at different stages of the project. But more than explaining what we produce, we should explain

why our projects are structured as they are — we can describe why a site map is important, or why

design mockups must be finalized before any HTML can be coded. In doing so, we can demystify the

project lifecycle for our clients, and help them better understand the sequence of events that lead them to

a successful project end.

Your Audience’s Needs

If you were building a house for yourself, you could immediately dive into the planning without taking

anyone else’s goals into account. Because you’re the only person who will be living in your little shack de

résistance, you can take wild liberties with the structure, layout, and aesthetic of your house. Go on, put

the bathroom in the middle of the kitchen— we won’t tell anyone, honest. Of course, if you ever have

any guests over for dinner, you can bet that you’ll get some puzzled glances, and more than a couple

questions about what you were thinking.

However, when designing a Web site, our own needs and preferences are the last that we should con-

sider. Rather, we design for others, for our users. If we build a site supplied with world-class content,

but the user can’t figure out how to navigate beyond the home page, then we’ve failed not only our

users, but in our design as well. A successful, user-centered design can yield high traffic, a flourishing

community of satisfied users; an unusable site nets you a high degree of dissatisfaction, the size of which

will likely be inversely proportionate to the size of your audience.

Of course, unlike the guests at that ill-fated dinner party, it’s a bit more difficult to figure out what your

users want. As a result, it’s far too easy to leave them out of the equation entirely when we make plans

for our sites. Instead, we discuss our pages as a collection of features, areas of functionality, or disparate

areas of content. That can easily be a rather cold way of assessing your site— and you can bet that your

users will give you the cold shoulder, hurrying off to find a site that helps them achieve their goals,

rather than hindering them.

Creating Personas: Putting a Face to Your Audience

So, how do we make a site more usable when we’ve never met a single one of our users? Given just how

virtual our little medium is, our users are often invisible to us. So, instead of thinking of them as a face-

less mass of surfers clicking through page after page of our site, we can create personas (or user profiles)

that give our users a face. Personas are model users who can help you better understand the needs,

behavior, and goals of your users. In creating these fictitious profiles, you can better understand and

anticipate the behavior patterns of the people who will actually use your site.

Figure 1-1 shows a sample persona.

While Frank is a fabricated user, his usefulness derives from the fact that he is strategically fictitious: his

biography, aspirations, and professional goals are all drawn from trends sampled from your site’s users.

By doing so, a persona becomes a valuable guide through the planning, design, and development pro-

cess. It allows you to put a face to the otherwise faceless people who will be visiting your site, and

allows you to avoid the pitfall of basing design decisions on technical or personal biases. Rather than

asking yourself how you might navigate a certain page, you can ask yourself how your persona might do

so. It’s a tactic meant to humanize the design process, yes— but ultimately, the quality of your site will

improve, as will your users’ satisfaction with it.

Chapter 1

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