CHAPTER 11 Surveys

You know whom you want as your ideal target audience, but do you know who your real users are? You may know some things about which parts of your site are being used and what kinds of issues people complain about. These things may even point to the fact that your actual audience is the people you want, but how certain are you?

Qualitative techniques such as focus groups, think-aloud usability tests, and contextual inquiry give you insight into why people do the things they do when using your product, but they can’t accurately outline the characteristics that differentiate the people using your product from the population in general. Only quantitative techniques can predict how many of your users are teenagers or whether they ...

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