The Design of Sites: Ch. 3 — Knowing Your Customers: Principles and Techniques
Chapter 3 of The Design of Sites. Argues that Customer-Centered Design rests on two pillars — knowing your customers (this chapter) and keeping them involved iteratively (the book’s next chapter) — and that knowing your customers is itself a prerequisite for choosing and customizing design patterns well.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Principles (Know Your Customers): design teams are not their customers; every design balances four competing elements — people, tasks, technology, and social/organizational context.
- Accessibility (Accessibility): a concrete example (red–green color deficiency defeating a color-only error message) shows why the “people” element includes basic perceptual variation, not just demographics.
- Task analysis (Task Analysis): a structured way of cataloging what customers currently do and want to do, illustrated by two failure stories (an unfindable refund form; a dentist’s billing system that ignored handwritten margin notes).
- Personas and scenarios (Personas and Scenarios): context-rich stories and recurring fictional customers used to sanity-check design decisions before any software is built, illustrated with a worked “Victoria/ebirthdayz.com” example.
- Customer research methods (Customer Research Methods): ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and focus groups, each with distinct strengths, costs, and the recurring caveat that surveys and focus groups capture what people say, not what they do.
- Affinity diagramming (Affinity Diagramming): clustering raw observation/interview data into a candidate information architecture, ahead of Card Sorting (drawn from elsewhere).