Article Idea:
Designing for Market Segments
suggested by Sebastian Milec on 2006/09/22
We often speak about usability, taxonomies, etc., but we rarely think about and employ marketing and economic principles into our work. Yet most web sites have a singular underlying purpose:make money. This can be through actual sales or leads, pitching products or services, or more abstract marketing. Yet most user experience architectures that I’ve seen neglect entire market segments and thus forego much potential revenue. This article “Designing Web Sites for Market Segments” is a great start.
Want to see this idea turned into a story?
1 person said yes. | 3 people said no.
Madonnalisa G. Chan
3 Reputation points
Posted 2006/09/22 @ 13:13PM with
I’m not sure if they neglect entire segments on purpose so much as identifying what is the profitability of building for a particular market segment. I would imagine that during market/user research they are able to identify what truly would be most useful and of course doesn’t cost so much to be built. It’s all a balancing act.
Jonathan Baker-Bates
17 Reputation points
Posted 2006/11/26 @ 13:38PM with
When I first saw the Paradyme website, mild dyslexia made me read it as “Parody Me” so I thought the site was some kind of IA Onion. Reading the article you link to makes me wonder if I wasn’t in fact too far off the mark.
Sebastian Milec
-2 Reputation points
Posted 2006/12/13 @ 12:34PM with
Jonathan, thank you for your tactful comment. Were you unable to understand the concept or do you just oppose utilizing it in the field of user experience design? Using market segments to drive the design of products and services is not a novel idea, but one that is sometimes missed in web site design. This practice has been a fundemental conept in the field of marketing since its inception. Few would argue that addressing various market segments in product and service design is a flawed notion. In fact, by designing with personas in mind, we often do design for market segments. Of course, there are a number of ways to segment market segments and the article covers one that we have found to effectively increase our clients revenue. Perhaps a more intelligent and constructive comment would have critiqued the specific points made in the article rather than offer embarassingly juvenile jabs at a service mark that you misread.
Madonnalise, thank you for sharing your points. I completely agree with your comments. Sometimes, it is impossible to address a broad range of market segments and the designer has to focus on one or a few. Nonetheless, I believe that by addressing user segments of varying interest and motivation levels, we can design user experiences that appeal to a greater number of users. I have seen this to be especially true for commerce web sites.
Fran Diamond
6 Reputation points
Posted 2007/01/23 @ 08:45AM with
I’m curious as to where personas would fit in the mix. My understanding of personas that while they are not entirely economically driven, they ought to be good representations of the users/customers of the web site. If there are two primary personas the web site is designed to serve, would they not take allow the IA/designer to incorporate that particular “segment.”
There is always the danger of designing to a demographic, rather than a human being, which can result in impersonal or generic communications.