ASOS: Audience & Home Pages

Focus: your audience. It's important to find out what your audience needs in order to write your content in a way that they'll be able to use it.

7 Steps to Understanding Your Audience

1. List your major audiences: ask yourself how people identify themselves with regard to your web content.
2. Gather information about your audiences: need to understand who they are, why they come, what they need, and how to write web content for them.
3. List major characteristics for each audience: key phrases, experience, emotions, values, technology, demographics, and social and cultural environments are all important categories.
4. Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stories: gather this information and answer it in their vocabulary, so they can utilize it.
5. Use your information to create personas: create a composite of the characteristics multiple website visitors.
6. Include the persona's goals and tasks
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site: these give users a good sense of the people visiting your website, as well as how they use your website.

Home Pages

You set the tone of a website with it's home page. Personality is important to incorporate on the home page in order to keep visitors interested in the site itself. There are 5 major functions of home pages:

1. Identifying the site, establishing the brand
2. Setting the tone and personality of the site
3. Helping people get a sense of what the site is all about
4. Letting people start key tasks immediately
5. Sending each person on the right way, effectively and efficiently

While reading 'Writing Web Content that Works,' by Janice Redish, I couldn't help but think about one website that I had recently visited that was successful in covering the critical points that the chapter listed, for identifying with your audience as well as functions of the home page.

ASOS is a website that sells fashion goods to both men and women ages 18-34. This information is clearly stated in it's description on multiple search engines (the image provided above is from Google's web search. While there is not necessarily a persona created for this website, ASOS has over 40,000 styles to shop, which allows online shoppers to create a very diverse wardrobe. 

The home page on ASOS's website allows users to shop conveniently by selecting their gender and then more specifically, the article of clothing that they wish to shop for. After selecting which clothing article they wish to shop for, the user can even further refine their search to match their specific size, desired color, price, and brand.

   

My shopping experience with ASOS was easy and efficient with the help of their refined search tool. It's a website that understands that people who shop online don't want to spend hours searching for an item. This is a website that has definitely thought about its users' goals, since it has resources that allow the users to shop quickly and hassle-free.