Focusing on user needs - Marketplace

It is vital to know who your target audiences are and how they will access your information. This information will determine how you design and prepare the electronic publication.

However, targeting information on a website is very different from the targeting of conventional publicity and information.

Conventional marketing is effective at getting the information to the intended audiences. Leaflets are sent only to mailing lists of the target audience, or displayed in places they are likely to visit. Advertising is placed in magazines or in TV programs that appeal to the target audience.

This leaves design and text in conventional publicity free to concentrate on the task of communication with particular kinds of people.Anyone with access to the Web can show up at your website, whether your information is for them or not. Websites have to do their own targeting by directing users to the information or services that are for them.

Some industry experts suggest that the different levels of a website should have different aims.

Information on the upper levels of a website will be targeted at a very broad general audience. The aim is to help users swiftly find what is relevant to them. or move on. Design should aim to be professional and sufficiently engaging for a broad audience. In this context Government sites should aim to:

• Make immediately plain that this is a government site.

• Make clear what the owning organisation does.

• Make clear the kind of content and services on the site.

• Build trust in the authority, accuracy and currency of the information.

• Build trust in the security and effectiveness of the transactions on offer.

• Direct regular users to content that is new on that particular site.

• Offer access to the rest of government sites.

• Send different kinds of interested users to content that is aimed at them.

Middle layers of the site can be for people with some interest in content or services. This level of the site should aim to:

• summarise information or available transactions.

• provide enough details or facts to satisfy mild interest.

• provide enough details for people with strong interest to select the detailed information that is for them or who wish to apply for the service.

Middle levels of the site can also be a good place for key messages aimed at the general public. Writing and design can in this case be more clearly targeted at the target audience.

Lower levels of the site will tend to provide the detailed information that government sites so often make available. Here the aim is to:

• secure the interested user’s agreement to read the information.

• and offer users the choice of reading onscreen or different file formats to download.

An exception to this approach is likely to be a website that works as part of a publicity campaign. As advertising is likely to be driving an interested audience to the site, there can be a greater degree of targeting.

The aim of the site should be to add value to the campaign by such means as:

• providing more detailed information than the advertising could carry.

• reporting on progress towards the goals of the campaign.

• providing a transaction that facilitates users’ response to the call to action for the campaign.

An important aim of design will be to make it plain that the site ties in with the look and feel of the campaign. Users should be in no doubt they have come to the campaign’s site. The content and transactions on the site must reinforce the value of the brand.

Campaign sites should be revised as the campaign changes or be taken down once the campaign ends.