Simon Gurnsey

I saw an interview with Alan Cox from leftclick. He calls the person who he imagine is coming to a website the “Golden Person”. Alan Cox imagining the Golden Person isn’t any sort of a magical process, it is a systematic analysis of your organisation and who your target audience is. They then go and talk to these people.

If Leftclick are building a site for backpackers, they will go down to Cathedral Square and interview backpackers. LeftClick spends a lot of time imagining who will come to the sites they build and why. AND they talk to real people. They’ve built an enviable reputation as a result.

Do this for your website! Ask yourself and others; Who will come to our website? and Why?

• Imagine the people you think will come to your website
• Who are they? What age, gender, race and sexual orientation?
• What are they coming for?
• Now narrow this down a bit, imagine one person
• Find someone like that
• When you come to your site, imagine you are this person. What are you looking for and is it easy to finding?

Imagine what your visitor wants. What have they come to your site for? It may not be what you want to give them!

Here are some of the reasons that people might come to your site, so make it easy for them to find:

• information about your services, online
• your contact details
• information that can help them solve their problem quickly

This is a once only chance for you to establish trust and build the credibility of your organisation.

The first part of the process described above is called user profiling[1], the second is usability testing[2]. They are both highly technical fields and often expensive to get done professionally. Have a go at doing them yourself, its better than not doing it at all.

[1] “User profiling is the act of building up a profile of who your users are what they want to do. These profiles are used to group and prioritise the activities of users. Knowing who your users are and what they want is the first, vital step in meeting their needs.”  – Open Interface

[2] Read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users Nielson says, if you interview no one you get no insights. Well actually he says “The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights.”