26 Oct Who Are Your Website Users, Really? (It’s Not “Everyone”)
Part 2 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series in my own words on the UX principles I use in client work.
Ask a business owner who their website is for and the most common answer I hear is: “Everyone.”
I understand why. After all, you don’t want to turn anybody away. But a website built for everyone ends up helping no one in particular — and visitors can feel it within about five seconds. The headline is vague. The menu tries to cover every possible errand at once. The one thing a real customer came to do is sitting in a pile with nine other things, all shouting at the same volume.
In contrast, user-centered design — the approach underneath everything in this series — starts with a harder, more useful question: who, specifically, is showing up, and what job are they trying to get done?
A user is a person with a problem, not a demographic
For example, in my work, I don’t start with age brackets and zip codes. I start with the errand.
For instance, think about a church website — I’ll use First Baptist Church of Goldsboro, a recent project of mine, because the contrast is so clear. That one website actually has at least two very different users:
User one has never been through the door. It’s Sunday morning, they’re getting ready, phone in hand, a little nervous the way anybody is walking into a new church. Their job is: tell me what time, where to park, where my kids go, and what people wear — fast, and without making me hunt for it. They don’t need the full church history. They need service times, the address, and reassurance, in about ten seconds.
User two has been a member for years. It’s a weekday evening, they’re at a laptop or tablet, and they’re there to register for an event, check a ministry schedule, watch a service they missed, or give online. Their job is: get me to the thing I already know I want, without the welcome tour. They know the church. They just need the door to be where they left it.
Same church. Same website. Two people in completely different frames of mind, holding different devices, in a different rush. If you design only for one of them, you quietly lose the other.
The same split, on another site
Similarly, you see the same split on the NC Freedom Fest site: a family on the day of the festival, phone in hand, needs the schedule, lineup, and parking now — while a sponsor or vendor months earlier, at a desk, needs partnership details, deadlines, and who to contact. One site has to serve the hurry and the planning without mixing them up.
In short, that’s what “know your users” actually means in practice. Not a poster on a wall — a short, honest list of the real errands people bring to your site.
The three questions I ask about every user
First, when I start a project, I work through these with the client. You can do a first pass on your own site today:
1. What did they come to do?
Book, buy, call, register, donate, find the address, check the hours, see if you serve their town. Write the top three jobs down. Everything on the homepage should visibly help with at least one of them.
2. In what situation are they doing it?
On a phone in a parking lot? At a desk at work, in a hurry between meetings? At home in the evening, comparing you with two competitors in other tabs? Situation shapes design: screen size, patience, noise, one hand free or two. A design that works in your quiet office can fall apart in real life.
3. What does “done” look like for them?
Not for you — for them. For your business, “done” might be a quote request. For the visitor, “done” might be knowing what happens after they submit that form. If your site takes their information and gives them nothing back — no confirmation of what happens next, no timeframe — their job feels unfinished, even though your form worked perfectly.
As a result, that gap, between what the business counts as success and what the visitor counts as success, is where a lot of websites leak customers.
Watch out for the user who isn’t a customer: you
However, the most dangerous user to design for is the owner.
You know where everything is on your site, because you put it there. Your acronyms all make sense to you. And the service that makes you the most money gets the biggest button — even if it’s not what most visitors came for. None of that makes you wrong about your business. It makes you the worst possible test subject for your own website, because you can’t un-know what you know.
That’s why, in the next posts in this series, I’ll talk about learning from real visitors instead of guessing — and about the mental traps that sneak in when we only ask people who already like us.
A 20-minute exercise that helps more than a redesign
Next, grab a notepad and answer this for your own site:
- Who are my top three visitor types, named by their errand? (“Parent trying to register a kid for an event” beats “moms, 25–44” every time.)
- For each one: what’s the one page or button that matters most to them?
- Now open your site on your phone and try to complete each errand, cold, without using any shortcut you happen to know.
For example, if any of the three takes more than a couple of taps, or you have to stop and think — so does your customer. And your customer doesn’t owe you the patience you just gave yourself.
Start there. In addition, design gets a lot clearer, and a lot cheaper to fix, once “everyone” becomes three real people with three real jobs to do.
If you’re not sure who your website is really serving, that’s exactly what a discovery conversation is for. I build websites for small businesses, non-profits, and churches across Eastern NC – packages start at $699, and services start at $40/hour. See recent work or get a free quote.
Previous in this series: What Is UX Design? · Next: The 5 Stages Every Good Website Project Goes Through
This article is my own take, in my own words, on UX principles I use in client work — informed in part by completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.