Understanding your users #

How you organise information depends on whom you’re organising for. For example, you might organise the same information one way for doctors but another way for patients.

There are many ways to understand the target users. You can observe them, talk to them, or learn about them. If the target users are people in your company, you’ll be surprised at how much you already know about them.

At the very least, you should be looking for:

• The job they are trying to get done
• The information they need to get the job done
• How they look for this information—the information-seeking behaviour

Below is an oversimplified description of intent, part of a persona in design literature.

Joan is an event planner at ABee. Her immediate job is to plan the upcoming East Asia Forum. She hopes to use last year’s event report as a reference. She will look for it on the company’s intranet. She sets off with the keywords: East Asia Forum, annual events, report, 2010.

If people like Joan are your information target users, then such little descriptions of intent can go a long way in shaping how you organise information for them.

An essential tip: get to know the people for whom you are organising information.

Another tip: don’t stop here; keep testing your designs with them. Later in the book, you will learn about two tests: card sorting and usability testing.