2.2 Assess and Research Visitor Needs

When creating a product or service, identifying your target audience through user-research, analytics, data collected using ethical anonymous methods, or feedback from and with visitors is important in being able to create a customized service for and with them that is tailor-made for their specific preferences, adapted for any needs they may have, and particularly useful in helping a website or application evolve its service to meet sustainability targets.

Criteria

Identify And Define: Primary and secondary target visitors are identified, and their needs are defined through quantitative or qualitative research, testing, or analytics, ensuring your visitors and affected communities remain a close part of the research and testing process.
Visitor Constraints: Potential visitor constraints like the device age, operating system version, browser, and connection speeds are accounted for when designing user-experiences.
Barriers And Access: The team has researched and identified whether a technical, material, or human constraint might require an adapted version of the product or service that reduces barriers or improves access to content.
Barrier Removal: Barriers to access (pain points or dark / deceptive design patterns) have been identified in the user-research with visitors for removal.
Seat At The Table: All stakeholders including your visitors have been assigned an equitable role in the decision-making process when undertaking research, identifying needs, or conducting iterative design work.

Impact

Medium

Effort

High

Benefits

Environmental:
Undertaking analytics or research allows you to customize your product or service based on the needs of your visitor. The benefits of this are that emissions will be reduced due to an experience not making assumptions or developing unnecessary features (wasting resources), and being more specific about how you might reduce a product or service’s environmental impact.
Privacy:
Assessing the needs of visitors will help you comply with privacy laws like GDPR, and anonymous analytics alongside test data can also be used to improve privacy.
Social Equity:
Improved user-experience often means products or services work better for visitors on older devices, in low-bandwidth environments, those with older devices, those in restrictive countries, those who speak different languages, and those with other potential barriers to accessing content. This reduces emissions as less e-waste will be produced if the need for newer equipment becomes less of a priority.
Accessibility:
Understanding the needs of your visitors through accessibility and trauma-informed research will help you prioritize which inclusive design improvements need to be implemented to enhance an already accessible product or service.
Performance:
Identifying what visitors require through research and analytics will reduce the potential for technical debt along the product’s lifespan, which will help reduce emissions as developers will spend less time building a product with unnecessary features. It can also be used to identify bottlenecks in the user-experience that are causing visitor abandonment. Fixes can be measured and tested against each other, and the benefits of improvements can result in fewer emissions.
Economic:
Knowing your audience has financial benefits, as they are more likely to purchase your product or service if it meets their requirements. Quantitative data analysis can identify potential cost savings by reducing data payload sizes where optimizations can be made.
Conversion:
If a product matches an audience’s requirements, they will be likely to use it regularly and this will increase its popularity and gain trust, word of mouth, and social standing.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Medium
water: Medium
emissions: Medium

Example

A User-research plan with a template. Plus some additional interview templates. Also a user-experience return-on-investment calculator.

Resources

View the Guideline