Let's take a look at the world of print, for a moment, specifically the section of it occupied by magazines and other periodicals (I think that of all the paper media, these are the closest in format and function to most web sites). A magazine may, though it be distributed across the nation and have millions of subscribers, appeal to only 20% or less of the literate public. Yet this magazine is successful. With all of the varied viewpoints and interests out there a magazine must narrow its target audience down to do a good job of reporting all the news etc on a certain subject. 'Popular Mechanics' does not compete with nor target the readers of 'Bass Masters', just as BM does not target the audience of or compete with 'Good Housekeeping'. They have chosen their audience.
Yet when we look at the web there is an idea, which is almost a holy grail of design, that we must design for everyone. Our sites must be accessible to everyone and we must include content that appeals to the widest variety of people. Somehow we are expected to do as designers (amateurs for the most part) what magazine publishers and editors have never been able to do, and knowing this have never tried to do. We are expected to make our interest appeal to everyone. This is a tall order and one which I believe has caused us to lose a primary focus of what we do, namely, choosing and focusing on an audience for which we will design.
Now surrounding the issue of accessibility there is a great deal of strong emotion, stemming from strongly held beliefs, opinions, and a spectrum of points of view. People with the newest browser would like to see all of its features exploited to the fullest while those with the oldest browsers want to be able to view the site in a fashion appealing and understandable to their antiquated technology. People with fast connections want high bandwidth content while those with slower modems want pages that load this week. People with all of their senses intact want content that comes at them on many different levels while those who are sensory impaired in some way want to be able to experience the whole site through whatever medium they have available to them. It is not impossible to design for this, but in doing so you must make a great many compromises and let go of many preconceived plans and ideas.
In terms of broadly appealing content we have many options available to us to help us supply whatever we might want to our audience. Their are online companies who will pipe stock reports, sports scores, and horoscopes to our sites for nominal fees (usually a garnish banner ad). Their are companies which will provide us with an interface so that we can front end their online catalogues to all of our visitors for which we will receive a nominal (though much hyped) return. With a little patience (for how many times you'll have to fill in your personal information) we can hook a hundred different services into our site, and by then end of the day we will have created . . . a portal, or as most people term them, a mess. Is this then what we must do to appeal to the widest possible audience? Must we turn every site we design into a portal?
So let us then spend months carefully crafting our site so that it's text is readable by everyone and so that the text in question says things that everyone will want to hear. Those months will be spent well, I assure you, for at their climax we will have joined the ranks of other designers who have managed to clone Yahoo, and Excite, and Webcrawler. . .
We can travel down that road with eyes open that so many traverse unknowing. We can choose our audience. Let us take a look at a hypothetical site (which based on the size of the internet I am sure exists somewhere at this very moment). Let us say that a certain wealthy college student has traveled the cities of the country and the world on his summer holiday so that he may experience the wide variety of bars and pubs to be found therein. This student, whom we will name Ron, collected a round, cardboard beer coaster from every establishment he sojourned in as a memento of his explorations. Upon returning to his home (let us say in a frat house?) Ron sits down at his computer to compose a letter to all of his family and friends about his trip. After struggling with writers' block (and house parties) for several weeks he decides that the best way to tell everyone about his trip is to show them about it through the artistic medium of his coasters.
Right here, by choosing a subject for his site, our fledgling designer has begun to select his audience.
His next step is to scan in all of his precious bits of cardboard. After several weeks of scanning (he traveled far and drank often, after all) he has managed to digitize his entire collection of 578 coasters. His next step is to put them together into a site, for which he will be turning to his freshman year roommate (a programming major) for help. Together they create a site which showcases the collection as well as telling a little bit about where each piece came from. In doing this they utilize various technologies which necessitate that a member of their audience have a 4.0 version of a browser or higher. In order to be fair Ron creates a secondary site which is more compatible, but upon examination he decides that it does not do justice to the magnitude of his vision and therefore he scraps it. After all, a careful look at his partner's site has revealed that less than 7% of the hits on that site come from older browsers.
And his audience is narrowed further.
Now though he traveled the world in search of hops, Ron speaks only his native tongue and has written the text for his site only in that language. He considers seeking help in translating the site into other languages, but eventually decides against it.
Once again he has focused his site down to a more specific audience.
With his site completed and uploaded to the web, Ron can sit back, crack open a can of __________, and rest easily, secure in the knowledge that he has made a web site for world-beer connoisseurs who speak his native language and who have a browser coded in the last 2 years.
Our hypothetical designer took four steps in choosing his audience:
These are all steps that we take in creating our sites, most likely subconsciously, but take none the less. And yet so many of us still experience a lingering guilt and anxiety over whether or not we have made our site appealing to the widest variety of people. Let us not hinder our abilities any longer by hampering creativity in favour of conformity. The web is huge and beautiful because it is composed by people who have, for the first time in the history of civilization, the ability to tell everyone in the world all about their stamp collection, latest song, or lingering health problems. Leave the conformity and the mass-marketing to the people who have no originality and creativity of their own. Let us continue to explore our diversity by experimenting and by creating things which appeal to us and to people like us, rather than squashing these impulses simply because the popular mechanics, the bass masters, and the good housekeepers would not be interested in them. Someone out there is.
A.G. Peabody , 07/25/2000
http://www.valaquenta.com