Ever feel like you are making the right call but the client won’t buy it? Leverage what they have already told you about the target audience.  At Flightpath we do a thorough discovery process for all major engagements. One of the key components of this discovery centers on who the users of the website will be.

So when it comes to how to phrase a question in a registration path, what colors to use in a design, or even where to put a step in the registration process, why go in circles debating it with your partners on the client side from the corporate tower. If you know who the people are, why not just ask them what they think?

We recently used our knowledge of a target audience to poll friends, family, peers and acquaintances who met the target criteria for feedback on mood boards and a preliminary design that will inform the formal design phase.  If you set up a simple enough survey most people will take 5-10 minutes to do it. My guess is it’s a nice change of pace for the average working folk.

To do this, we leveraged a free service at Wufoo.com to post artifacts and ask some open ended questions in a basic survey. There are other free services we have used in the past like surveymonkey.com.  Then we sent out an email to our colleagues to explain the demographic we were looking for and basically said, “Please send this survey link along to people you know who fit into this very specific demographic.”  In just 2 days we had about 45 responses at no extra cost. The whole process of creating the survey  and sending out the email took less than an hour.

We will analyze that survey which includes both qualitative and quantitative data and discuss the results with the client during the design phase.