The Importance of Audience
by Meghan Wilker and Nancy Lyons of Clockwork Active Media Systems (aka The Geek Girls).
One of the most disturbing things about the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last October (aside from the small number of women in attendance) was a panel discussion by what one might call “average users.” The theme of this year’s Summit was “Discovering the Web’s Edge.” The organizers took that theme and explored the edges of gaming, technology, social networking, and–in this case–the edge of the Web’s users. Namely, older users (at the mid-to-high end of the baby boomer spectrum).
The panel consisted of three men and two women and began as good, clean fun. One of the couples already had a YouTube presence, which was discovered partway through the panel and then broadcast on the big screen to the delight of the audience. The facilitator asked questions about how they used the Internet which, not surprisingly, consisted mostly of emailing, personal ads, and Craigslist–which one user had recently discovered and was extremely excited about. Her excitement was amusing to everyone. (In fact, she seemed to think Craigslist was the Internet.)
But, what started out as a few giggles from the audience over one user’s Craigslist enthusiasm soon grew into uproarious laughter over just about everything that came out of the panelists’ mouths. At that point, we looked at each other in horror and realized that the audience was no longer laughing with this panel, but at them. Everything at the Summit up until then had been a lot of preaching to the choir: designers and developers talking to each other, about each other and for each other. At that moment, the Summit audience should have been listening more closely than ever. Sure, some of the panelists’ statements sounded naive or silly or uniformed. But, like it or not, these “technically impaired” users represent a far greater portion of our audience than those that are more “like us.”
It’s easy to insulate ourselves from the real world and ignore the needs of the average user. But, we’re not building experiences for each other, we’re building them for a particular target. And we would venture to guess that 9 times out of 10 a target audience is made up of those “average” users. As developers, we run the risk of contributing to the lack of usability on the web by building for ourselves in spite of the research or user information we uncover in the process. Admit it. We’re all guilty of it. You want your clients to “think outside of the box” or grasp your brilliant “creative.” We’ve heard more than one irritated Creative Director suggest, at one time or another, that the client just doesn’t “get” the big idea or can’t possibly embrace this cutting edge technology? We know they are out there. We’ve worked with them.
Yes, we have a responsibility to push our clients to think about their business and the Internet in ways that may seem new and unexplored. But, at the end of the day its not really about them, or us; its about the user. The user that thinks that Craig’s List is the internet. We don’t work with the average user. We’re barely aware of them any more. We gorge ourselves on the latest trends as dictated by our favorite blogs and news sources and summits and conferences and we get farther and farther away from that user. But who says we’re really the experts and we get to decide what’s bleeding edge? We’re just as guilty of insulating ourselves by reading the same blogs, the same feeds, using the same technology and not exploring anything outside of our technological comfort zone. This leads to an unhealthy sense of what’s happening in the world around us and what our mission as creators of Interactive experiences is really about.
So, does every site need to be created with your mom (or grandma) in mind? No. But we need to make real efforts to define and understand our site audiences — even when their technology skills may not be as good as ours. There are generations of people that aren’t “here” yet. But that doesn’t make them stupid. If we don’t reach them, we’re missing out on a significant faction of our commercial targets. And we’re doing our clients a disservice by not reaching their intended audience.
February 5th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I agree completely. I think that one reason for this exclusion of the user is that things are changing so fast — for all of us, even the most digitally literate. The user categories are constantly changing and overlapping. The user who blogs incessantly may not be into text messaging. The person who uploads their YouTube videos every week may not be into RSS feeds. Just for example. Anyway, you’ve highlighted a key principle: despite technological advances, humans will still be humans — and assume they know what “the elephant” (discovered by the blind men) looks like.