3 steps to gather your audience before UI and UX design
Who you are building the project for is equally essential to the problem you are trying to solve.
Jumping straight into the UX and UI design is a common mistake founders make. If you don’t know your users, you might build a great solution that is not adjusted to the market needs. This is why researching your audience first is crucial.
Here are three steps to help you understand your app’s potential clients and prepare for the later design and development stages.
Step #1: Identify your target audience
We will start at a very high level.
Write down all you know about the potential users of the app. Try to look for commonalities between them. You can focus on:
- Demographics: age, gender, location
- What challenges are they facing?
- What solutions (software or manual) are they using daily?
- How technical are they?
- What are their needs and pain points?
You can ask such questions on a scale via surveys, interviews, or focus groups.
Step #2: Use analytics and extrapolation
While performing step 1, you should gather many potential product users.
It would be a shame not to use the data you collected. Email, social media profiles, or phone numbers allow you to learn much more than what they put into the surveys. Many platforms will allow you to expand your knowledge or extrapolate the group to similar people, automatically expanding the list of users.
As examples, we can use:
- Facebook lookalike audiences
- LinkedIn predictive audiences
- Apollo.io
Step #3: Create user personas
At this step, you should have enough knowledge and potential users so it will be easy to spot the patterns and similarities between them.
Based on the knowledge gathered in the previous steps, try to define your application’s user personas. We are using the plural form because different user types, roles, and groups might be interested in using your application. Don’t limit yourself to a kind of client; look wider.
There are different techniques, definitions, and descriptions of the user persona. Choose the one that best suits your business and will help your marketing team expand its user base.
Summary
Now that you know exactly who you are building your product for, every development step will be more straightforward.
You can present the personas to the UI UX designer, developer, and the rest of your team. Whenever there is a question about how to do something, you will have in mind the actual people who are about to use it, and making decisions will be easier. From day one of the UX and UI design process, you can adjust it to a detailed group of people.
I hope you now see that skipping this step can be a huge mistake and a blocker for the business.
There is one more bonus from performing this process, as we described above.
You end up with at least a couple of hundred people interested in your product. From now on, you don’t have to rely on your opinions or thoughts; you can simply ask the audience what they really need. This is a giant benefit for every business.
Lastly, this should be a massive motivation for you to deliver the product people are waiting for.
How can a UI UX Designer support the process?
Above, we put a short step-by-step guide on how to perform this process on your own.
But there is another way if you don’t have enough time, technical knowledge, or experience researching the audience. You can always delegate it to an experienced UI UX designer, who will perform the described actions and provide the results. This way, you will avoid learning tools and platforms and how much information is enough.
Ultimately, the faster you know your audience, the faster and better tool you will build.