A few weeks ago I was talking with a designer friend who was in the research phase of a project. She was working with a new client who is working on a brand-new product, and of course she needed to understand who the product is intended for. This is important because a design intended for tweens is completely different from one for retirees.
But in this case, my friend’s client told her that the intended audience was “everyone from age seven to 100.”
This caused her a fair amount of bemusement, and she was struggling to work out how exactly to respond to the client. Trying to build an app for a 93-year age range is certainly an interesting – if unrealistic – challenge, especially for a startup with limited resources. And that’s not even accounting for the legal and compliance issues related to building products for kids.
Even products with broad appeal tend to target specific segments. If folks outside the target use the product then so much the better. But the company isn’t necessarily catering to them.Even massive products like TikTok – which has around 1.8 billion users (that’s nearly a quarter of the planet’s population) – isn’t targeted toward literally everyone. We can see this by looking at the metrics:
- Women comprise the majority (54%) of users
- A quarter of TikTok users are age 10-19
- Nearly 70% of users are under age 40, with only about 11% being over 50
That’s not to say that older folks aren’t using TikTok (granfluencers are totally a thing) or that design teams shouldn’t consider them, but the overwhelming majority of users are younger and female, so that’s where the focus should be.
During our discussion my friend and I ended up dwelling on the central question of how you find who your audience is.
I’m a Designer. Isn’t This the Product Manager’s Job?
In some ways, yes. As designers, it’s not necessarily our jobs to deeply understand every metric and nuance of the business. That’s why companies employ business leaders, sales folks, and product managers.
But that said, it’s hard to design if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Designing a product for 18-40-year-old tech tech aficionados is a lot different than designing one for over-50 gardeners. And I can tell you that product managers sometimes ask for things that don’t exactly make sense, and having some background knowledge makes it easier to ask probing questions to better understand how their request aligns with the overall product vision.
Once I was designing a fast-food loyalty app. As I was designing the onboarding experience the product manager presented me with a list of 12 fields required for signup, including home address, home phone, gender, and birthday. I asked if we planned to send people physical mail; he said, “No, but maybe we will someday.” I pointed out the two main problems with this: first, no one wants fill out a form that long – and especially not on their phone – to get 50 cents off a cheeseburger. Second, the constant stream of data breaches has made people warier of giving up their personal information. We eventually managed to whittle the list down to something more palatable, but I still wonder why he thought we needed so much information.
Finally, when conducting UX research it’s crucial that we garner feedback from the right people. If we’re talking to the wrong ones then we’ve wasted both time and money on less-than-useful research.
The Trouble with Kids
Building digital products with kids can be especially challenging. In the United States, companies are required to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which brings a whole mess of complications and rules.
Canada recently passed Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), which includes specific rules around data collection for minors.
In addition, states have either passed or are considering laws restricting what data can be collected on kids and how it can be used.There is even disagreement around what constitutes a “child,” with some states including 16-year-olds.
These are topics best left to lawyers, and well beyond the scope of a design blog. But my point is that companies need to carefully consider a range of criteria when determining the audience for their product or service. If you are building for the under-18 set, then make sure that you’re up to date on the latest compliance rules and be mindful of their particular needs and behaviors.
Yes, some companies try to skirt this issue, but it doesn’t seem to be going super well for them.
What About Everyone Else?
OK, so let’s say your product is targeted for adults; it’s still safe to say that you should not target everyone from age 18 to 100+.
When creating a new product, it's almost always better to start with a small target audience. This allows you to focus on a specific group of people and create a product that meets their needs and preferences. Starting with a small target audience also allows you to get feedback quickly and make changes to your product before launching it to a larger audience.
Once you have refined your product based on feedback from your early adopters, you can then expand your target audience to a larger group. This approach can help you create a product that is more likely to succeed in the market and avoid costly mistakes.
Finding Your Audience
Finding your audience can take some time and effort, and there are seemingly countless ways to do so. Here are six tried-and-true steps that you can use to get started.
- Define your business goals. Whether you have a new business or an existing one, you need a business plan. Any business plan should include some information about what you’re trying to sell and to whom. And even if you’re in a big corporation or launching a completely new product or feature, you should have some idea of who you’re trying to sell to.
- Review metrics and analytics. Analyze your current customer base and their behaviors to identify patterns and trends. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What are their needs?
- Conduct market research. You can also conduct market research to gather data on your target audience. This can take many forms, such as surveys, focus groups, and other research methods.
- Analyze your competition. Who are your competitors targeting? Is it working? You don’t want to blindly follow the competition, but it can be instructive to see what “the other guy” is doing in order to identify gaps in the market and opportunities to differentiate your product or service.
- Develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are different from UX personas. Buyer personas are used in marketing to represent the people who are buying the product or service. They focus on characteristics such as demographics, buying behavior, and motivations. UX personas, on the other hand, are built on top of buyer personas and consider usability, user motivations, goals, and pain points.
- Review customer requests. If you’re building on a current product, you should take a look at what your customers are asking for.
Wrapping It All Up
Whether you’re launching an entirely new product or adding features to an existing one, it’s crucial to understand who your target audience is. While it’s temping to aim for the largest possible group, doing so is often counterproductive, especially for startups or teams with limited resources. Even very large, widely-used products have a defined core of users.
By investing a little time upfront and using the steps listed above you both designers and product managers can gain a deeper understanding of their intended users, resulting in better outcomes.
