In search of an audience: Thoughts towards finding your website users
Over the past few months I’ve been part of a team tasked with repurposing a series of advice articles to focus more closely on specific user needs.
It’s always fascinating to delve into analytics and build up a detailed picture of the people using your content.
We also stored the data we produced on [insert trendy project-management tool here — I still like Trello], and have reused it in the research stages of other projects — very handy.
But I’ve found that for all the talk of user personas and discovery sessions, there’s little practical information around on exactly how to work out who your users are and what they want to know.
So I decided to write a bit about some of the techniques I’ve been using.
Of course, user research allows you to get closer to the people who actually use your site (in a non-creepy way, obvs).
But user research also has its role to play in stakeholder management, allowing you to show your colleagues exactly why you’ve made something in the way you have by referring to your research and therefore bringing you closer to that golden sign-off moment.
Start top level
As a way to ease into the task, I like to start fairly top level, and look at the general stats of pages on your site related to the topic you’re working on.
Google Analytics gives you really insightful demographic data on things like:
- your users’ gender
- their age
- the device they’re using
Additionally, the general traffic information Google provides shows you how popular a particular area is — and therefore the position it should take in your information hierarchy.
To delve a little deeper, it’s important to do some keyword analysis, using tools like:
You can get much of the information provided by these services on Google too, but I think it’s good to consult a few different sources for your data.
Anyway, what all of these different bits of kit will show you is crucial information on the language your users use to search for your content, giving an idea of how much they understand about a topic, and whether your own language usage matches theirs.
Keyword analysis is especially useful if you work in a relatively niche sector, as you can gauge general understanding of a topic and pitch your content appropriately.
For example, in the project I began by talking about, we’ve found that our audience tends to use the phrase “council housing”, although a more correct term would be “social housing” or even “council and housing association housing”.
As a result, we decided to rename the appropriate section of our website, and will hopefully see an upturn in traffic as we feed that Google algorithm.
Delve into the details
Once you’ve got a general overview of your users, it’s time to get stuck into the nitty-gritty.
Depending on where you work, it’s likely you’ll have access to a CRM system, where your colleagues record all kinds of interactions with your customers or clients.
This is a gold mine of data that can show you:
- how often a particular issue is dealt with a year
- the time it takes to resolve
- what the biggest sticking points are
- the eventual outcomes
Essentially you get direct access to the who, what, where and why of an organisation.
It’s also likely that the people responsible for managing this system truly love their data and will be more than happy to dig out all kinds of weird and wonderful information for you.
In this content redesign project, we’ve been fortunate enough to have access to a webchat team’s transcripts.
These are all stored centrally, meaning we could search for information by keyword and see exactly what the most important aspects of a particular area were.
There is a danger that because the information you’re looking at is inherently interesting, you’ll end up spending entire afternoons going through it.
It’s an idea to set yourself a specific objective — for example, to see how many people got in touch about a certain issue in the last month — otherwise you’ll very soon have more information than you know what to do with.
Just ask real people
Even if you do have these systems in place, you should send a call-out for information across your organisation too.
Of course, the very nature of digital means you don’t always have direct interactions with your users (except through social channels) and unless you’re the GDS you might not have a massive budget to spend on a user researcher.
But it’s more than possible that teams in your company do deal with your audience every day, and have great ideas that they will share with you if you ask them nicely enough.
It’s easy to do this fairly informally over email, or you can formalise the proceedings a bit by collecting data using something like Survey Monkey, which will allow you to easily visualise data in different ways — something that’s very useful if you have to present your findings to colleagues.
Another thing we did in this project was ask for a group of people to volunteer as “digital champions”. It’s a slightly patronising and overused corporate term, but this was a really useful thing to do, as we could:
- run research workshops with the volunteers
- send them prototypes of content to feed back on
- have a list of designated contacts to call on with specific queries
Look for official data
Moving on, there’s very often a wealth of facts and figures put together by official channels or potentially by your competitors that you may be able to draw on.
To take another example from the project I’m banging on about here, we looked at quarterly reports by the Ministry of Justice to get a sense of how long it takes for landlords to evict tenants.
We were able to use this to put together a timeline of the “average” eviction, with information on roughly how long each stage of the process takes, the aim of which was to allow users in this situation to plan their next steps more effectively.
Failing this, you can search online forums or join relevant Facebook groups to get that direct access to your users.
One advantage of ploughing through channels like these that are external to your website is that your findings will be untainted by your own content — ie. you’ll often see how users think and speak before they look at what you’ve produced.
To wrap things up, once you’ve gone through your discovery/user-research phase, it can be good to get all your stakeholders in a room and talk them through your findings. That also gives you an excuse to do a bit of a presentation (woop! — I’m into that anyway).
