Identifying Your Target Audience

We will now go through a quick straight forward process to help you recruit 0:00 the right people for your user interviews, I call these people participants. 0:05 Participants help you validate and invalidate your assumptions. 0:10 They give you data that helps you build products and 0:14 services that are human centered. 0:17 You may be tempted to turn to friends and family for feedback. 0:19 Friends and family are always happy to give you feedback, 0:22 the problem is that friends and family are biased. 0:26 They're your friends and your family, how can they hurt your feelings? 0:29 Of course your idea is great. 0:33 Sure they'll use it. 0:35 No doubt they'll pay for it, and a lot too. 0:37 It is critical that you identify and recruit the right people for 0:41 a customer research. 0:45 Who are these right people? 0:47 These are the people who you currently envision as the target audience. 0:48 For example, if you live in Europe and 0:53 you're target audience is in North America, you're not collecting 0:55 good data if you go to the nearest supermarket and interview people. 1:00 Recruiting the right participants will ensure you collect the right data, 1:04 that you learn the best lessons, and that you truly validate or 1:08 invalidate your assumptions. 1:12 First, the target audience must be determined so 1:14 you know who you are looking for in participants. 1:17 We need to determine their participant criteria. 1:21 Go to attributes for 1:24 participant criteria are ones that represent your target audience. 1:25 If you're not sure who your target audience is, 1:29 that's perfectly fine, make an assumption. 1:32 During your user research activities with those participants, 1:36 you'll figure out if your assumption is validated or invalidated. 1:40 Here's a sample list of participate criteria for an imaginary app for 1:45 learning how to dance. 1:49 Reside in the US, they have a smartphone, 1:51 they wanna learn how to dance, and they use Facebook. 1:54 Give it a try, think of a clothing store for adults. 1:58 How might we improve the in-store experience of shopping with technology? 2:02 The store would like to know if a certain idea they have is something their 2:07 customers would value. 2:11 In other words, they want an answer to the question, do people need these products? 2:12 Now let's form an assumption. 2:18 An assumption is something that is accepted as true or 2:20 you believe to be true, even though you don't have proof. 2:24 Here is their idea expresses an assumption. 2:28 We believe that parents who visit the store with their kids need a device that 2:32 makes their clothing shopping experience faster and more fun for their kids. 2:37 List a minimum of five attributes for your target audience. 2:41 Don't limit yourself to just five attributes. 2:45 If you have 10 or 20, that's perfectly fine as a starting point. 2:48 If you have a timer, set it for five minutes to list five attributes of people 2:53 who might be the target audience for the clothing stores idea. 2:58 Who do you wish to recruit for your upcoming user research activity? 3:02 Ready, go ahead, create your list. 3:06 I'll see you in the next video to discuss creating questions from these criteria. 3:09