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Designing for an Audience of One

by John S. Rhodes and Bill Skeet

If you want a great Web site, one that custom fits each person, then read on.

You think you know all about usability and you think you understand your users. You feel like you know them dead cold, right on. You have solid demographic information, you know their favorite Web pages, you have data on when they are visiting your site and what they are buying. You know a lot, but we bet you are looking at averages. 

Are you also looking at data points?  Are you looking at individuals?  

One Size Does Not Fit All

Simply stated, the problem is that you lose individuals for the sake of knowing the group averages. You're designing for the common denominator when you could be designing your site to fit each and every person.  Further, you could be marketing one-to-one -- making each interaction personalized.

The Web allows you to communicate with each and every user. Simply put, your site always interfaces with individuals. Groups of people are not looking at your site, it is a one-at-a-time situation.  Think about it, when was the last time a group of users bought something from your site?

Average Person Fallacy

Maybe you think you're on top of the situation just described.  Maybe you're designing a site so the "average person" can use it.

There is a well-established adage in human factors that the average person does not exist. For example, the result of designing for the body dimensions of the so-called average person is that the smaller 50 percent of the users cannot reach the controls or read the displays, and the larger 50 percent will not have room to move about comfortably. 

No one is average.  In fact, few people are average in even a few dimensions (see Human Performance Engineering, 1996, by Robert W. Bailey).

To test the concept of the average person, a 1952 anthropometric study categorized 4063 men according to ten measurements used in clothing design. Not one man was average in all ten dimensions and less than four percent were average in even the first three. 

This means that designing a Web site requires more than imagining what a faceless, generic user might do.  It means you must identify real users -- their motivations, abilities, skills, needs, biases, and environments.  Find out what makes each person tick.

Of course, it is impossible to build a custom site for every single user.  The key for making this a manageable problem is to define your audience as precisely as possible.  Then, try to identify the characteristics of that population. You need a good sample, and you need to look at the data points as well as the averages. 

The Web site design should accommodate 95 percent of your users by considering a full range of characteristics from the 2.5^th percentile to the 97.5^th percentile.  Here is a partial list of characteristics you could consider:

• language (e.g., English)
• visual acuity (and color-blindness)
• internet connection speed
• browser type and version
• time constraints
• occupation
• technical knowledge

Obviously there are many more.  Define what characteristics are important according to the needs of your site.

Building Custom Fitting Web Sites

The usability of a site will suffer if you take an "audience view" of content development and site design. The language that you use should make your site sound and feel like a one-to-one, personal conversation.

Think about how much a lecture sucks compared to a personal conversation.  Design the site as if you were interacting with a single person.

Besides using a conversational tone, there are at least three other ways to improve the site-to-user interaction.

• First, while controversial, you can use cookies. People are becoming more familiar with them and hence their comfort level with them has risen. Also note that your competitors are probably using them, and if you don't you can suffer from a competitive disadvantage.
  
• Another way to improve site-to-user interaction is to conduct a survey. Individuals divulge a surprising amount.  Note that this method is only advocated if you use this information strictly for the purposes of improving your site.
  
• You can also attend to individual users via email. Never underestimate how far a quick response to an email will go. Be sure to take great strides to quickly and effectively respond. This is a simple, yet powerful, way of gaining a user's trust, and it is much easier than changing a Web site..  Also be sure to encourage feedback.

The bottom line is that you can build sites that are more personalized.  Think beyond groups.  Think about each person that is visiting your site. It is a one-to-one world baby.

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