Annex 2 – Methods to define the Target Audience

I. Defining target audience by structuring the information

The following table can be useful to structure the information for your target audiences:

Target Audiences / Services proposed / Quality of the service / Measurable objectives
Citizen /
  • Documents
/
  • Prevent duplication
  • Ensure legitimacy
  • Up-to dateness
  • Completeness
  • Etc
/
  • Number of pages visited
  • Number of visitors
  • Files downloaded
  • Number of subscribed to the newsletter
  • Less questions received in the mailbox
  • Etc

  • useful links
  • subscription to newsletters
  • search
  • mailbox
  • etc

Student
Etc. / Etc. / Etc. / Etc.
  • Target audiences: Define the categories/profiles of public (citizen, general public, journalist, officials) you want to reach.
  • Proposed services: Define the services to be provided by the portal for each type of audience.
  • Quality of the service: Identify quality criteria for each service (updates, completeness, etc).

Measurable objectives: For each service define a measurable objective. Quantitative or qualitative (number of pages visited, files downloaded, number of subscribers to the newsletter, questions received in the mailbox, etc).
/
II. Defining target audience with Personas, Roles and Use cases
Collecting data about your users can be valuable, but sometimes you can loose sight of the real people. Another way to define the target audience is to make your users more real by turning them into Personas. A persona is a fictional character constructed to represent the needs of a whole range of real users. Personas can help ensure that you keep the users in mind during the design process of your portal. In most cases, personas are synthesized from a series of interviews with real people. Rather than asking your interviewers what they want, it is more productive to focus on what users do, what frustrates them, and what gives them satisfaction. These interviews are then captured in 1-2 page descriptions that include behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment. Some fictional details might bring the persona into life. The idea of creating personas is to overpass the personal opinions and presuppositions to understand what users truly need of a portal. It is possible to verify your findings with surveys or other techniques. Please see point 3.2.5. Personalisation.
Personas can be further formalised into Roles. A role is a particular position or function that a certain person performs. These positions or functions bring with them the need to access information or content in specific ways. In order to understand the way in which each role accesses information, one establishes so-called Use-cases. A use case is a methodology used to identify, clarify, and organise system requirements, based on the way the system’s intended users will work with it. The use case is made up of a set of possible sequences of interactions between the information system and its users in a particular environment and related to a particular goal. A use case can be thought of as a collection of possible scenarios related to a particular goal.
III. Defining target audience with user surveys
While defining your future portal's structure and contents, it might be a good idea to take a survey of the portal's intended target group, in order to get some feedback on what they consider necessary and useful. After all, these people are the raison d'être for your portal; it might save you a lot of iterations if you ask their opinion from the outset.
One approach that has been successfully applied to design such a survey goes as follows: first, you hold a number of brainstorming sessions, in which you ask your team to express as many new ideas about the portal as they can think of. You will then typically end up with a long list of items, which you have to purge to obtain a more manageable list that can be presented for potential target group to vote. To obtain more specific results, you can divide the points on your list into a number of subject areas, and ask users to select the subject area which best describes their interest group. To ease the collection and subsequent analysis of the results, you could design the survey to be fully database driven.
Once the portal has been built up, bear in mind that surveys on user experience and satisfaction should be organised regularly. User feedback can be collected by:
  • On-line feedback forms and contact points
  • Portal’s statistical and administration tools (using also the data profiles gathered through the personalisation services)
  • Periodic surveys.
  • Online opinion polls.