CDB Web Design

Well, what is Target Oriented User-centric Design?

It’s web design with an equal balance between:

• Target audience
• User experience
• Web norms

So why does this need to be coined? Is all this not already a common sense guideline for every web project?

The easy answer is no.

Most web designs, even taking into account the modern way of thinking with regards to usability, never seem to find the balance between these three factors in most cases. If a website uses good usability standards which cater for their target audience specifically, they nearly always miss out on web norms making what would seem a perfect experience an unusual one.

The more traditional way of thinking was to just focus on target audience and web norms. Many people will have heard (and said) “that’s what Amazon do”  – I’ve said it myself – but that’s not always the whole story, and you can never directly copy someone else’s web methodology.

Amazon are actually a good case study in their own right. Their website breaks many web conventions and is regularly annoying to use for many people, but still they’re successful because they stick to certain web norms/usability must-haves: an excellent search facility, intelligent categorisation, multiple product images where available and a step-by-step checkout process including a “one-click” option for repeat customers.

Target audience

The balance is something hard to find. Most companies won’t truly know what their target audience is, which adds a big challenge to and TOUD-based design. The target audience is always the place to start and gathering that data should be a priority. It doesn’t always take a huge 10,000 user study either. You can take a random snapshot of a customer base three or more times, compare results and you should get a correlation, whether it’s gender, geography or some other common factor.

Web norms

The next step is to find out what current web norms are. These change every year or so and it’s vital to keep up to date with major players. The most popular websites in the world and in your locale are what you should look for as this will be what people are used to. It good to look at competitors and learn any innovation lessons, but most companies get fundamental things wrong so never use competition as a guide.

Usability

Web usability is at least something pretty common across the world and within most design circles. There are many references that you can refer to online for web usability (a good one is Userfocus) and any rules on these sites are best stuck to. There are the odd one or two that you can bypass but major ones like consistent navigation, buttons for submit actions and strict homepage design are essential.

Bringing it together

Current sites that bring this together well seem to fall into the fashion arena. They generally use accepted web norms like big, rich images for promotions with simple CTA’s (calls to action) and use just the right amount of innovation and simple signposting. The audience of most fashion websites is web-savvy, under 40′s who use the web frequently. This negates the need for heavy, text based signposting (like every link on a page saying something like “Click here to see our full range of men’s shoes” rather than “men’s shoes”). See sites like Next and ASOS.