Deep understanding of your target audience: the basis of an effective website

User experience plays a decisive role in the success of any business of today. Understanding your target audience is essential for creating an effective website. You can only achieve an effective website when you understand the deepest drives, motivations, fears and pain points of your target group(s). With this knowledge, you will know how your website should function so that users can achieve their goals. But how do you start making this information insightful? In this article, we take you through the concepts of personas, empathy mapping and user journeys. We explain why we prefer empathy maps to personas and how mapping out a user journey can support in concretise which components for the website are required.

Bringing a target group to life with a persona

We will start with the term ‘persona’. You may have heard it before, but a persona is a detailed, semi- fictional representation of an ideal customer or user of a product, service or website. There are different ways to create a persona, and personas do not always contain the same information. Some things you might encounter and recur frequently are:

• A name for the persona.
• A photo of the persona, to make the persona more tangible.
• Demographics (Such as age, gender, location, level of education, occupation etc.)
• Personal characteristics (Interests, hobbies, values, lifestyle etc.)
• Goals and challenges (What does the persona want to achieve? What obstacles do they face?)
• Technological behaviour (e.g. what technologies do they use and what is their skill level?)
• Quotes and comments

By combining these elements you create a coherent picture of the target group. But is this representation actually that representative?

Let’s say farewell to the traditional persona

While personas can be valuable, they are still not our first choice when we want to zoom in on the target audience. Personas have a risk of making the target group very generalised and superficial. This is because personas have a strong focus on components like demographics and other superficial characteristics. The focus on the part that really matters if often missing or not explored a lot; what drives the user? What are the user’s fear and pain points? By creating more focus on these components, you ensure a more hands-on approach when designing a user experience. That’s why we think empathy mapping is more valuable.

What is an empathy map and what does it look like?

An empathy map allows us to provide a better understanding of the target group. This is because an empathy map focuses on gaining a deeper understanding of the emotional and psychological aspects of the target group. They emphasise on drives, motivations, pain points and fears.

An empathy map can be divided into the following sections:

• Who are we empathizing with? Here we describe ‘who’ the person is that we are trying to understand. What situation are they in? And what is their role in that situation?
• What do they need to do? What are they trying to achieve? That decisions do they need to make? Or what are they trying to do differently? How do we know if they are successful?
• What do they see? What do they see in their immediate environment? Or in the market?
• What do they say? What have we heard them say? What can we imagine them saying?
• What do they do? What are they doing today? What behaviour have we observed? What can we imagine them doing?
• What do they hear? What do they hear other say? What do they hear from friends? From colleagues? What are they hearing second-hand?
• What do they think and feel? What are their fears, frustrations and anxieties? What are their wants, needs, hopes and dreams? This involves the real intrinsic motivation to want something or the obstacles they encounter in their path that keep them from doing so.

A real understanding of the user with empathy maps

Empathy mapping is really about understanding the deeper aspects of the user experience such as; emotions, feelings and context. Compared to personas, which often focus on static demographic information, empathy mapping offers a more dynamic and richer picture of the user experience. This is the reason why we focus on empathy maps rather than personas.

From empathy mapping to a user journey

Empathy mapping allows us to know more about the target audience and their motivations. This also makes it easier to figure out how they will react in certain situations. In a session will map out the journey the user takes in a canvas called ‘user journey’, also called customer journey. During this session we will dive into the journey the specific user takes together.

We will deepen this scenario in a number of steps, also called phases.

Step 1 – Awareness

How is the user initially aware of this process? When did the user think of buying a new television? The user might have seen a cool new television at their friend’s house? Did his own television break down?

Step 2 – Consideration

What does the user experience when he starts the process? In other words; how does the user start his search for a new television? Does his search start on the internet? Does he physically go to the shop? How does he compare the different range of televisions on offer?

Step 3 – Decision

What happens in the key moment of the process? What happens when the user actually goes to buy the television? How does the user decide which television is suitable and which is not? And what does the buying process look like?

Step 4 – Exit

What does the user experience when the process is complete? The user bought the television, now what? Does the user need to wait for his television to be delivered? Or does he need to take the television home from the physical shop itself? How is the contact with any shop employee?

Step 5 – Extend

What happens a long time after the process is completed? Is the user still encouraged to make another purchase that suits him?

We will start filling out the user journey step by step, starting with the first step and describing the following top to bottom:

• Interactions and touchpoints. At what point does the user interact with the product and what does the user see? Which pages of the websites does he visit? What other touchpoints, if any, of the brand does he see that are of interest?
• Emotions and thoughts. What does the user feel and think within the step or phase?
• Pain points. What problems or obstacles might the user encounter in the step or phase?
• Opportunities for the website. Looking closely at the issues we have described, what opportunities do we see for the website? How can we facilitate the user’s journey even better within the website, so that the user reaches their goal (more easily)?

Summarising into user stories

In the end, we will summarise all the components in a user journey document. A crucial part of this document is, of course, what insights we have gained from the exercises. In order to document this in a correct way so that we can use this in the realisation process, we will transform these opportunities into user stories. This list of user stories is not a complete representation of the project’s required user stories, but it does give a good indication of where we can make an impact on the user.

Have you identified your target audience effectively?

Let’s uncover valuable insights together to enhance your website’s impact!