‘Psst. Go to the usability tab‘ - tracky_birthday (flickr)

I’ve always unconsciously considered that there are two ‘parent’ demographics that roam the web, namely the technically minded, and the general public. This parent-demographic difference is born out of the medium being new to some, and second-nature to others.

As a designer and creator of products on the web, the premier factor in making decisions needs to be user perspective, and catering to what they need (as opposed to say, what a client may prefer - their users know better). So knowing the people that are going to be using the site is crucial to every aspect of its building - much like you wouldn’t try making a perfume without ever meeting a woman who may want to wear it.

First decision in detailing your demographic: are the overwhelming majority of my users going to be technically minded, or part of the general population? Some may argue these are one and the same, I disagree. Ask a member of the general population to subscribe to your RSS feed, and see if they don’t head straight for the bottle of Jack Daniels.

Many sites that I’ve worked on are aimed at a web-savvy populus, and so while I’m working with NannyGroup at the moment helping with their latest product LandlordNanny, the thought processes are having to be a lot different than if I was redesigning a regex tutorial site.

A few of the differences in decisions include :-

• All the copy throughout the site needs to reference what the user sees, not what they should assume. As an extreme example just to make the point, call it an organiser, not the YUI AJAX Calendar. Use common words for everything. Sites for the public are not a platform for showing off your technical writing capabilities.

• The general public tend to hold more expectations of what should be where and how it should be presented, and the techie crowd tend to be more flexible towards straying from conventions. You can get away with using that burning creative freedom when your site is aimed at people who know how it all works. In fact, they’ll thank you for giving them something new to see. The general public don’t care and just want to be able to use it during their lunchbreak (i.e. quick as possible) to accomplish whatever goal they have in mind.

The LandlordNanny Website

LandlordNanny aims to provide UK landlords with the tools to manage their properties and tenants, and find new tenants through major property portals, not usually accessible to independent landlords but through expensive high street estate agents.

The site is a work in progress, and new updates are being released on a bi-weekly process, but things are moving quickly. When the site was shown to me, the code was a monster, far from standards compliant, a mix’n'match of HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 strict (why no transitional?), inline CSS, and nearly all presentational elements were defined in a database.

Yes, I said presentational elements, not content. Positioning for the page elements were being called from a (poor, unloved) MySQL database on every page load.

Main aims to start off with naturally boiled down to:

• Order primary crimes against web standards and prioritise the worst offenders
• Bring graphical interface to a more mordern look and feel
• Create a consistent style and layout throughout the site/application, including building separated stylesheets
• Identify inconsistent and confusing user interface experiences (for example the omission of a property portfolio) and change with a general internet user in mind
• Implement new and planned features using the new style standards and ‘cleaned’ system

One example of change was a renovated menu. As a team (a fantastic team, I may add), we took a menu with cluttered icons and image buttons and created a clean CSS menu that loads 400% faster.

I aim to blog more on the difference between audiences that we design for, but for now, check out LandlordNanny and give us your feedback in the comments!