Target Audience Ages and Website Design

Web design collateral often emphasizes that an audience analysis is a critical first step when developing or re-designing a Web site. Designers may plan, develop, and implement an elegant site, but the site may not draw traffic or founder if it does not satisfy the needs of its target audience. Audience analysis ensures that Web designers fully account for the goals of the site and select a layout/style that caters to the target audience.

Audience analyses are typically produced as part of the Web development process, but this post will perform a partial audience analysis on two existing Web sites. The analysis will focus on the age of the site’s target audience.

• http://www.noggin.com/ is the Web site for the Noggin cable television channel. Noggin concentrates on preschool programs and features original series. The target audience for the Noggin Web site is young children.
• http://www.guinness.com/ is the Web site for Guinness beer, which is a dry stout brewed in Dublin, Ireland. The target audience for the Guinness Web site is adults who are of legal drinking age (21+ in the United States).
  

www.noggin.com

The site also shows evidence that certain pedagogical concepts were incorporated into the design, such as visual and auditory learning. The visual layout of the Noggin site is certainly tailored to the target audience. A pastel color scheme with large fonts and graphics immediately grabs the attention of young children. Young children do not have fully-developed attention spans, so Web sites that target them should not include long paragraphs of text. Instead, movement and activity maintain the interest of young children. The Noggin site correctly favors playful graphics over text. Most of the graphics are animated on mouse-over, which adds an element of interactivity. In addition to visually appealing graphics, the site offers audio clips. When users drag the mouse over the character graphics, the characters “speak” to the users. Although the ideal learning situation for many young children is kinesthetic/tactile (see the popularity of Play-Doh and finger painting), such interactions are not possible on the majority of computers (discounting touch screens). Instead, the site does a great job of providing the type of audio and visual interaction that children enjoy.

The screenshot below includes some text boxes (left side in black font) and pointers (red arrows) that show the auditory and visual features of the Noggin homepage:





Since the Noggin site is for a revenue-generating television station, a valid observation is that the goal of the site is not truly educational. The goal of the site is to promote the Noggin brand and the characters that appear on the channel’s programs. The goal of users, most of whom navigate to the site with the help of their parents, nicely complements the goals of the site (e.g. most users want to see and learn more about the characters from their favorite Noggin programs).
I do think that cultural aspects play a large role in how the Noggin site is perceived by users, primarily because the Noggin channel is based in the U.S. Children from other countries, where televised entertainment perhaps does not play a prominent role in their lives, may enjoy the site, but would lack a reference point for the content.




www.guinness.com

The Web site for Guinness beer is restricted to adult audiences (or at least to adults who are of legal drinking age). This restriction is designed into the site’s initial page. The initial page includes an age check to (supposedly) ensure that users can legally purchase alcohol. Because the site must consider international users where legal drinking ages vary, a country-specific drop down box is provided. See the screenshot below:






Most users visit the site to learn about the history of Guinness, view special promotions or purchase merchandise. The target audience, as with most alcohol advertising, is young people between the ages of 21-35, depending on legal drinking age. When the site does attempt to convey information, it uses learning styles that complement the target demographic. Flashy graphics and visuals are favored over text. The layout and color scheme of the site is very modern and sleek, including a nifty interactive timeline about the history of Guinness beer (see screenshot below). Clearly, the site favors the visual over the verbal.







The roles and goals of potential users are fairly straightforward. Users are interested in learning more about the product promoted by the Web site. A certain number of users visit the site to purchase Guinness merchandise. The site does a reasonable job of accommodating shoppers, but merchandise is not the focal point of the site. If the site designers wanted to sell more merchandise, they could include prominent pictures of the merchandise on each page of the site. Instead, merchandise marketing is relegated to specific pages only.