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Moving On
Once you get a strong sense of why you’re building a site, who will be using it, and who has final approval over what gets created, it’s time to move on to studying the users themselves. Throughout this crucial phase of your project, you’ll gain tremendous insight into what’s important to the audience—and what isn’t—so you can start designing something that will make them happy and loyal users.
In the next article in this series, I’ll discuss why understanding users is so important and how to go about researching your audience. The approaches to be discussed include contextual inquiry, organizational exercises, surveys, and writing "personas" to put the human touch on your user profiles, ensuring that everyone involved in the project understands who will be using the final product.