Your primary concern for your site should be the people using it. There will be different types of users; some deserve more focus than others. Often you may design your site for a single, or primary, user. It is important to keep in mind secondary users when exceptions to your initial plan are necessary.

Identification of your users is important for understanding their environment, activities, schema (mind set) and knowing what technologies are involved. Just like you have goals for your site, the users have their own goals in using it. Based on the user’s goals, you should identify the activity the user is involved in while visiting your site.

For example, if you are creating a website for a small business, your goal is to sell yourself, and your user’s (customer’s) goal is to buy. You may want to have an element present in your site that allows them to contact you from anywhere in the site. Understand why your customer is at your site so you can deliver to them.

A person’s activity influences how and what they are thinking. If you are playing basketball the word “dunk” means something different than if you are eating doughnuts and drinking coffee. Make an effort to understand your user’s activity and how it is going to affect how they interact with your site. For example, use terms for your links that are related to the information your user is looking for.  This is one of many ways to facilitate navigation of your site.

The environment your user is in will also play a critical part in how you design your site. Just as there are multiple users, there are also multiple environments. These environments include the physical space around them, the social environment that is guiding their activities, and more specifically in regard to the web, the computer’s operational environment. Often factors in one environment will influence factors in another.

Since you are already thinking about our user’s goals and activities, focus your attention on where that activity takes place and who else is involved in that activity. Designing a website that is familiar to the user will not only make it easy for people to use but more pleasurable as well.