Aiming for the Audience

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While I've always kind of dreamed of performing for a crowd like this, I have to be honest with myself- I'm no rockstar. But there are a few things I've learned from rockstars and from Janice Redish's Letting Go of the Words. It's that you have you have to aim your performance for your audience- whether that be at a rock concert or with a company website. At a concert, if the audience is expecting upbeat, rock music and they get twangy, bluegrass, then I'd like to bet that they aren't going to be pleased. Also, if your website doesn't offer easy access to the information that the web users are looking for, then they likely won't be pleased either. So that leads me to my first point:

1. Focus on the audience

In order to do this, the audience must be understood and profiled. This seemed like an excellent approach to me. Redish suggested that personas and scenarios are created in order to keep the human aspect in the creation of the website. It can easily be lost when trying to focus on the product and the information. Instead, if desires or problems can be anticipated, then they met or solved, respectively, before the users even have access to the website. By creating scenarios, the focus is always on audience needs.

My second point is this:
   2.  Keep It Simple, Stupid
Meaning the home page, of course. The home page is usually the first impression that a user gets of your website. Personally, I don't like going to lots of newspaper websites simply because they are so cluttered that I can't sort through everything. I do like when the logo is at the top because then I clearly know what site I am on and how to easily link back to the main page. The next thing I like is when icons are links- maybe that's because I'm visual learner, but I also think that these are easier to scan than written words. If a homepage is kept simple, users are more likely to be able to find the information that they came to the site for.

Finally,
    3.   Put the search box in a logical place
This may seem like a no brainer, but I have encountered many sites where I simply didn't know how to even start on their site because I couldn't find what I was looking for and then couldn't find a search box. So, therefore, I felt that this warranted its own point even though for Redish it didn't seem like a main focus.

Discussion Questions:
What websites do you use that have simple, dummy-proof home pages, and what characteristics make them like that?
How can companies do a better job of meeting user's needs before they even ask for something or encounter a problem?