Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Portfolio Target Audience

Target Audience #1 - Educationalists
Paula is a 59 year old female working as an External Examiner for Edexcel. She works part time earning approximately £7,000 per year. She is an intermediate web user who goes online every other day and accesses the internet from home. Paula enjoys spending time with her grandchildren and going to the gym to keep fit. She uses Internet Explorer 6 as a web browser and has a 2MB broadband connection. Her monitor is 15inch and has an 800 x 600 screen resolution. She mainly goes online to check her emails and to do online clothes shopping. Her favourite websites are Monsoon and Next where she spends roughly £60 per month on new clothes.

Target Audience #2 - Industry Professionals
Patrick is a 42 year old male who works as a Technical Operations Manager for a Web Design company based in Doncaster. He earns £40,000 per year and has a company car. He is an advanced web user who accesses the internet every day except weekends for approximately 8 hours. He enjoys keeping up to date with the latest technologies in the interactive media industry and regularly attends courses to further his knowledge. He is a keen sports fan and has been a season ticket holder at Doncaster Rovers F.C. for over 20 years. He enjoys spending time with his wife and children and regularly takes them on days out. Patrick mainly accesses the internet from work and uses Firefox 2.0 as a web browser. He has an 8mb wireless connection and uses a 17inch widescreen monitor with screen resolution set at 1024 x 768. Patrick accesses the internet to catch up with the news headlines on BBC, sport headlines on Sky Sports and to order books and DVDs online at HMV. He regularly spends around £100 per month shopping online.


Target Audience #3 - Potential Clients
Julie is a 32 year old female who is a self employed mobile Beauty Therapist. She has just started up her business and requires a website to market the services and prices of her company. As her business is in its infancy she does not have a set wage and simply takes home whatever profit is left after paying her overheads. She is a novice web user who has recently bought a PC and is beginning to learn the basics to enable her to go online and check her emails. Once she has gained more experience she will go online once a week. Julie enjoys going shopping on a weekend and meeting her friends for a drink on a Saturday night. She will access the internet from home using Internet Explorer 7 as a web browser and will have a 2MB broadband connection. She will use a 17inch monitor set to a 1024 x 768 screen resolution. She currently doesn’t shop online but when she becomes confident in using the internet she will spend around £50 per month on cosmetics at Boots.

6 comments:

Craig Burgess said...

Why is your first target audience not a course lecturer? It's highly unlikely that a member of the board of examiners will look at your portfolio, and even if they do, they are not your primary audience you are appealing to. You could argue that you don't need to make it appeal to them at all - they are only there to mark the work after all.

You may also find it useful to give your target audience profiles labels so you and others can easily differentiate what each one is referring to i.e. Clients, Employers etc.

Ben Waller said...

Thanks for your comments Craig. The job roles I had specified for each of the target audiences were simply to illustrate which sector they would form part of. For example I am not focusing solely on a 59 year old External Examiner called Paula.

I agree that this could be made clearer though by giving labels to each segment of the audience.

Richard said...

I agree with Ben, I think aiming for a member of the examining board is a good target at this stage of the course, because this is part of an assignment after all. If they are here to mark the work or oversee samples of work at least, even if there’s only a small chance of them seeing it then it would be advantageous if it appealed to them.

You have really built a good picture of who might visit your site. I think specifics help here because it gives you an actual image of a real person even though they don’t exist.

Craig Burgess said...

Rich, I disagree. You don't have to make the portfolio appeal to external examiners at all, and it would probably limit what you came up with as your design.

I don't see the external examiner target audience as a relevant target audience on any level, purely because they wouldn't be looking at it as it appealed to them, they would be looking at the design merits.

If you can make your site appeal to a 59 year old AND young hip designers looking for new talent then you're a better designer than me. They are two very conflicting target audiences.

Ben Waller said...

I think that the main aspect of the target audience is that Target Audience #1 = Educationalists. This encompasses a wide range of job areas. I used External Examiner as an example of one random member of the sector. I could quite easily have stated Course Tutors or Course Leaders to illustrate educationalists.

Before I gave each of the profiles a particular label e.g. potential clients etc I can see where the confusion would occur. Hopefully now they are all labelled you will be able to see that Target Audience #1 = educationalists. An External Assessor would form part of this audience but would not exclusively comprise the entire audience.

Richard said...

If this is true then you could take educationalists out of the equation all together, unless your possibly planning to extend your study in this industry, because wouldn’t all these people be looking at the design merits? You cant please everyone all the time so to target a number of people just because of their job and expect them all to like it is truly unrealistic.

Our college assessors are two different people with their own tastes, one may love the portfolio the other may hate it but they both would see the design merit in the work(hopefully).