Designing UI for Intended Audience: RSS

Identifying the intended audience for your web site plays one of the most important roles in designing the user experience. Persona profiles will influence the user interface, and among other the content style.

One of the dimensions of the profile is technical proficiency of the user.
In this example, we will explore the implication in designing the interface for the RSS support.

When do we stop explaining what RSS is?

Well. We don’t. Especially if our audience might not be familiar with the benefits of RSS and we want to inform/educate them. It might be easier to set them up with RSS than to journey into explaining how cool Twitter is.

Levels

Informing the user our website supports RSS can be accomplished in many ways, graphical and contextual.

< meta >

The super technical will look at the source, locate the meta tag links, fire up their rss reader and paste the URL of the website. The feed is added. Done.

It will be useful to place as a notification for less technical.

Other audience will benefit if we add the name.

Maybe they are looking for a feed or subscribe in the title.

Should we educate them? include the Wikipedia link?

Or maybe our audience is more used to e-mail subscriptions and they are not familiar with RSS.

Needless to say, we would usually combine many of these.

Carefully defining the profiles goes a long way in understanding how we can leverage the design of our user experience through the user interface, to properly address the needs of our audience.