Client and Audience Analysis

This week our group had a meeting on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 5pm. At our meeting we worked on and discussed the upcoming client and audience analysis of the Neighborhood Health Services web site. We created personas that encompass the scope of expected users for the site. We also each conducted a heuristic evaluation and benchmarking exercise regarding the site. This ties in with the current lectures in that we have been focusing this week on user needs and behaviors. But in order for us to be able to effectively assess the needs and behaviors of our users we must first determine who they are. More specifically, we learned about information seeking behaviors, as well as about different types of information needs. This can be applied to help us understand the users better and to ensure that all the users’ needs are met by the new implementation of the Neighborhood Health Services web site by first figuring out where the current site is lacking. We learned how to create personas as well, which proved to be quite helpful when we sat down to determine the user groups for the Neighborhood Health Services web site. The user groups we came up with were patients, doctors, volunteers, and donors.