Audience based navigation

There is a growing trend for websites to use audience based navigation on the homepage. University websites commonly use this technique where information for current students, prospective students, staff, alumni etc. forms the navigation of the website. Whilst it is encouraging to see audiences are getting so much attention on homepages, there are some important considerations when using this technique.

Should our website use it?
It is easy to decide on a whim that “our website needs to be broken into audience groups on the homepage”. However, there are instances when organising a website into logical topic areas over audiences performs better:

• If the majority of content and functions on your website does not differ between different audience groups, there is little benefit in separating content into audiences.
• In cases when there is one primary audience and other (lesser) audiences, having all users make a selection of which audience they belong to becomes an unnecessary step for the primary audience.

Audience based navigation works well in the following cases:

• When the majority of content on the website is exclusive to individual audiences.
• Card sorting exercises show that users categorise by breaking up content into specific audiences.
• For current topic oriented websites, users have comments such as “so much content is not relevant to me”. These comments are a clue that users are hoping for audience specific content.

Where to specify the audiences (homepage or in subsequent pages)?
Having decided there is a significant difference in content for the various audiences, next is to consider whether the audiences should be presented on the homepage, landing pages or even the content pages. In the case where the content is primarily unique to an audience, having the audience selection on the homepage makes sense as the content on the landing page and content pages can be targeted to that audience and exclude any non-relevant content early in the navigation.

When there is considerable overlap in content between the audiences, a worthwhile approach is to provide audience based navigation choices once the user has already made a topic based selection from the homepage.

Ensure the audience selection is clear
Ensuring the audience selection has no ambiguity is critical for the success of audience based navigation. We often observe users in usability tests struggle to identify which audience is relevant to them, or feel that they fit into multiple audiences.

For example, one website we tested provided information “for government” and “for educators”. But many users confused information for educators to be for anyone in the general public wishing to educate others rather than for those who work at school (which was the intended audience).

When confused, users feel like they are missing useful content by selecting the wrong audience. Or feel they need to navigate to all audience areas to learn who each section of the website is for. In the above example it was a simple matter of changing the label to “for schools” for clarity. In some situations, it is important to provide a very explicit description of the audience for clarity e.g. “for school teachers and staff”.