Discovering your audience: tools and techniques
Understanding your audience is a strategic cornerstone for building successful online products. A crucial part of our discovery phase here at Liquid Light is understanding who will be using the products we build and how they expect to use them. Audience research provides this insight, helping to identify the needs, preferences and behaviours of our clients’ audience, ensuring that the final product we deliver matches expectations.
By grounding our development in solid audience research, we can avoid costly missteps and create online products that really resonate with their intended audience.
Below are some of the techniques we use:
Surveys
Surveys are a great tool for gathering both quantitative and qualitative insights directly from your audience or stakeholders, and they are one of the first exercises we do when starting a new project.
We usually ask our clients for access to mailing lists or other contact databases and we conduct internal surveys, which go out to the organisation employees or the stakeholders we are working with. Not only does this give stakeholders or employees a chance to comfortably express the opinions which they might not have a current space or opportunity to do, but we also gain invaluable insight that feeds into our discovery workshops.
We try not to be too verbose with our surveys. It's always advisable to design surveys that are concise, to ensure high completion rates, and to use open-ended questions, to gather more nuanced insights. There is always a temptation to overload surveys but the longer the survey is, the less likely it will be completed. Be aware that open ended questions (rather than ‘rate’, ‘rank’ or ‘multiple choice’ questions) will give answers that need sifting through and effort analysing, therefore take into account the time needed for this based on the expected number of respondents.
Informal interviews
Conducting one-on-one interviews with stakeholders unearths insights into their needs, experiences and how they perceive your organisation. It is a vital qualitative method we use alongside more quantitative research methods. We use interviews with end users to ratify what we hear from organisation stakeholders within the discovery workshops and surveys we conduct.
Although we always prepare a set of open-ended questions, we run these interviews more as a conversation, and let the interviewee have the space to express their opinions. We look for common themes that can reveal critical insights or pain points, continually looking for opportunities to help guide our resulting strategy.
Segmentation strategies
Audience segmentation involves dividing your broader audience into smaller, more defined groups, based on specific characteristics, such as demographics, behaviour, or geography. This strategy allows for more targeted and impactful messaging, forming the basis for different user journeys and localisation strategies.
Website analytics tools such as GA4 can help identify these segments but the surveys and interviews we conduct, combined with the audience definition exercises that are part of our discovery workshops, give us a clear picture of audience segmentation. Which leads me onto audience definition:
User archetypes
Some form of representation of user archetypes are valuable tools for two main reasons: they help teams (both ourselves and our clients) better understand and empathise with their target audience, and they facilitate more focused and effective decision-making throughout the development process.
Traditionally this would be ‘personas’ but we do not go so far as to define these as such or create personas in the traditional sense. We take a lean approach to this work and meld some aspects of persona development with the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework. We focus on the tasks users might need to accomplish and take into account some behavioural and environmental aspects.
For us, audience definition threads through all of our discovery: within our surveys, our interviews and our workshop exercises. This gives us several inputs for audience definition and helps our clients focus on their audience and move away from an internal view of their organisation.
By creating representations of key audience types, we get a deeper understanding of users' needs (the objectives and tasks they want to perform), behaviours, and pain points. This helps inform design choices and feature prioritisation.
Any audience definition without research underpinning it can be dangerous and misleading, it can lead to incorrect assumptions about who is using a system and how they use it. Once we have made our first audience definitions within workshops and surveys, we then interview ‘real’ users to ratify the data we have collected.
A human first approach
Finally, it is also important for us to keep in mind that humans are complex beings, with a rich tapestry of emotions, experiences and backgrounds that define our overall behaviour and worldview. In contrast, when referred to as "users", the focus narrows significantly to how we engage with, respond to, and use technology. This user-centric view is important for creating intuitive digital experiences but it's just a slice of a much broader human narrative and we need to remind ourselves that user behaviour is just one dimension of our much more complex lives.
If you need insight into your audience, or a project you want to discuss, get in touch today.
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Owen Priestley
Strategy Director
