Understanding Your Users
“For websites, we don’t have the luxury of selecting only the best users. We must cater to the people who visit our website, regardless of their abstract reasoning skills. People in the last quartile are customers, too.”
The above is a quote from a recent e-mail newsletter from Jakob Nielsen. This quote stuck out to me as one who is an advocate of web standards and creating websites that work.
I have heard many web developers say things like “Well, our target market is {insert any market here}, so we don’t need to build for the rest.” I often here this from graphical designers or flash developers. They are missing the point — completely. Truth be told, we don’t have the luxury of selecting just the users we want to see on our websites — nor do we have control over their preferences (Browser, connection, plugins, etc).
So why are so many intent on alienating or bottlenecking (sacrificing) a specific audience? I have found the answer to this question to be ignorance. Now, that may sound harsh — but to only build for a target market and alienate another group is absolutely ridiculous. Scenes of this are all over the place. The government, Target.com, AOL, etc. I am not speaking directly of accessibility for the (color) blind, deaf, etc — but accessibility of preference. Why would you create something you know won’t work on one browser but will in another? Why would you create something that you know won’t work on one operating system but will in another? These are just two basic questions, but encompass much more complication in other areas.
Personally, I am tired of the lazy and ignorant. The web is not something you can control completely, and therefore takes more time, thought, and consideration to create something that is usable and accessible to all.
More to come on this topic later.