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Task-Based Audience Segmentation in Six Steps

M A Y 2 0 0 5

Indi YoungPractice [email protected]

© 2005 Adaptive Path LLC • All rights reserved • www.adaptivepath.com

Task-Based Audience Segmentation: May 2005 2

ContentsExecutive Summary .............................................................................3

Conceptual Research Fills Gaps ....................................................3

Task-Based Segmentation Locates Target Users ...........................3

How Task-Based Segmentation Works ................................................4

Defining Your Audience ................................................................4

Traditional Segmentation Techniques ...........................................4

Aligning Segmentation to Research Type .....................................5

When to Use Task-Based Segmentation .......................................6

Six Easy Steps ......................................................................................7

Step 1. Prepare Your Team ............................................................7

Step 2. Brainstorm Tasks ...............................................................8

Step 3. Group Tasks .......................................................................9

Step 4. List Performers By Task Group ......................................12

Step 5. Group Performers ............................................................15

Step 6. Define Audience Segments .............................................19

Moving Forward ..........................................................................22



Executive Summary

T here is often a problem when we use standard market segmentation techniques for designing Internet offerings.

Knowing more about the preferences of your target audiences does help you attract and sell to customers; however, it doesn’t help you design a product that will let users achieve their goals.

Task-based segmentation is a technique that defines your target audience by the tasks they perform to achieve a goal. It is an invaluable foundation for conceptual research, which is research that reveals how people think about getting things done.

Conceptual Research Fills GapsThere are three basic classes of research: ability, preference, and conceptual. Ability research shows what users understand, and preference research examines what users prefer. Conceptual research shows how users innately approach a goal, how they think about it, and how they get things done.

By applying conceptual research, you can learn how users would intuitively achieve a goal, and design your product accordingly. But before conducting conceptual research, you need to know whom to study.

Task-Based Segmentation Locates Target UsersTask-based segmentation facilitates conceptual research, preventing your company from wasting capital on studies that bring less useful market data to bear on your product development process. This technique ensures that your studies engage the best possible participants to help you shape your product.

This report is a step-by-step guide that walks readers through task-based segmentation, and breaks it down into six easy steps:

1. Prepare your team by setting aside preconceptions.2. Brainstorm tasks efficiently, and use

the best format to express them. 3. Group tasks to create user goal sets.4. List performers by task group using the

spreadsheet provided with this report.5. Group performers by identifying patterns in your

spreadsheet, and by using proven techniques to sort a complex data set into easily recognizable user groups.

6. Define audience segments by organizing information for instant visualization, filtering with applicable business data, and focusing on profitable user groups.

Readers will come away with a solid understanding of how to sort and track the detailed information necessary to select ideal study participants.



Defining Your AudienceThere is often a problem when we use standard market segmentation techniques for Internet offerings. Knowing more about the preferences of your target audiences does help you attract and sell to customers; however, it doesn’t help you design a product that will let users achieve their real-world goals.

Companies tend to design products based on a list of preference specifications. Many office phones, for example, have numerous functions. You can put callers on hold, transfer a call, conference in several people, and much more. But too often these features are unintuitive. Though engineers make sure that the phone fulfills the list of technical specifications, no one ensures that it’s usable. How many office workers can figure out how to conference in multiple callers, for example, without reading the directions that come with the phone? When product features map more directly to how users actually behave, users feel that their goals are easy to achieve. Your design lets them follow the path of least resistance.

This is where task-based segmentation comes in. Task-based segmentation is a technique for identifying audience segments for research studies. The method is based on analysis of user tasks — the steps people take to accomplish their goals. It provides a firm foundation for conceptual research, which is the best type of research for product development, because it ensures that users will find your product features intuitive.

To help you understand why task-based segmentation is so uniquely suited to conceptual research, we will first review some

of the more common segmentation techniques and the different kinds of research that companies do to improve their products.

Traditional Segmentation TechniquesMost of us are familiar with the phrase “target audience,” if only from its reference to television. All television programs are made with certain audiences in mind. Television producers match their programs with a specific set of viewers, so advertisers can buy commercial time during a program that is likely to attract their customers.

Target audiences are often segmented in one of four ways:

• Demographic segmentation divides people by characteristics like age, gender, or educational level.

• Psychographic segmentation indicates interests, preferences, and opinions.

• Behavioral segmentation gives status — first time, regular user — or usage rate.

• Geographic segmentation outlines region or population density.

Additional segmentation techniques have emerged to help companies understand consumer psychology:

• VALS Segmentation defines personality traits that drive consumer behavior. This used to be called “Values and Lifestyle,” and was developed by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/).

How Task-Based Segmentation Works



• Myers-Briggs Segmentation indicates psychological types by describing information consumption, decision-making, energy, and closure preferences (http://www.myersbriggs.org/).

These are all industry-accepted methods for consumer polling and purchase-behavior research, and most companies combine one or more processes to fine-tune results. Though these segmentation techniques are widespread, they’re imperfect tools for building applications.

When developing a software product or a website, we need to define target audiences based on what they’re doing, which is a richer data set than simple preference information. If you use only preference data in your design, you can end up developing a product that has all of the necessary features, but is difficult or even annoying to use.

Aligning Segmentation to Research TypeThere are three basic classes of research: ability, preference, and conceptual research. The first two are widely used for application development, but conceptual research gives you a competitive advantage. You have more freedom in designing your product, and a more distinct vision of how it does, and does not, serve user goals. How? Let’s look more closely at the types of research:

• Ability research shows what users can understand or accomplish, with certain tools or artifacts. Most usability studies of existing applications fall into this category.

• Preference research examines whether users like something. It tells you about user desires, needs, and opinions. For

example, a company’s marketing department would ask study participants what features they’d like to see in a product.

• Conceptual research shows how users innately approach a goal, how they think about it, and how they get things done. For example, you ask customers open-ended questions about how they accomplish goals, so that you can derive your product from their intuitive actions.

As with any product, designing software or websites requires a deep understanding of what customers want to get done. Note that this is distinct from how a customer uses the product, which would fall under ability research. We need to know what the customer wants to do, regardless of whether he or she has the product. We need to know users’ goals, and what procedures they follow to accomplish them.

For example, the process of purchasing a book usually doesn’t differ based on age, gender, interests, or preferences. Money is exchanged, and the buyer obtains a book. Which book you buy will vary greatly based on preference, but the essential act of buying is the same. Any book-buying site you build must support the basic goals and steps, in addition to influencing the decision to buy.

In this report, I outline six steps that will help you identify user tasks and goals. Our sample Excel spreadsheet shows each stage of task-based segmentation, and you can use the spreadsheet as a template for your own work. Note that any tool will work for this technique. You can use a word processor,



whiteboard, paper and pencil, or sticky notes to capture ideas. Use the method that works best for your team.

When to Use Task-Based SegmentationAudience segmentation normally takes place before a research effort begins. As we’ve discussed, task-based segmentation helps you define your audience before collecting conceptual research data for product design.

There are many types of conceptual research techniques that task-based segmentation supports. You might be doing a card-sort test, collecting data via a survey, conducting interviews, or any number of other types of research. In the example I use throughout this report, the team will be preparing to conduct interviews to collect data for task analysis.

Task analysis examines how your users perform the everyday work that is critical to their interaction with your product. It breaks your users’ relevant actions into tasks, and then rebuilds these tasks into one or more structured mental models detailing, at a glance, how your users think. You’ll find more information about task analysis in my companion essay, “Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis” (http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000295.php).

The example company I’ll use throughout this report is a fictitious movie distributor, JMS Entertainment. JMS wishes to create a Web-based marketing vehicle for the United States. The website will offer users several free features while also advertising new movies that the company distributes. To decide which features to

include on its website, JMS wants to study what moviegoers do related to finding, attending, enjoying, and sharing movies. (The team is not as interested in how users choose which movies to see, which is a purchase decision.) With a solid understanding of what moviegoers do, JMS will determine whether its anticipated website features match up. At the same time, JMS will be able to see opportunities for new or enhanced features that would further empower the user and accomplish business goals.

JMS Entertainment also has data from years of market studies. This preference research data has been collected based on demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic data. We’ll use this data at the end of the process, to help formulate the next steps JMS takes.



Step 1. Prepare Your TeamBefore you begin your own task-based segmentation, decide who will join you. Doing segmentation alone produces results that only represent one perspective of the tasks involved; this exercise benefits from multiple viewpoints. Together, you and your team can get through the necessary steps in two or three working sessions. Be sure to include team members from other countries if your product will be launched internationally.

Discuss the new approach. When you try task-based segmentation for the first time, you may want to discuss how it’s different from the other approaches your team has used. They’re probably accustomed to reviewing audience segmentation based on demographic, psychographic, or behavioral data. To make task-based segmentation work, you and your team need to let go of preconceived ideas about your audiences.

Having said this, some segments you’re considering might be based on extensive marketing research and survey data that already exists. These groups may be very reasonable groups to use for your audience segments. However, you won’t know for sure until you go through the entire segmentation process. If you don’t let go of your preconceptions, they will influence how you step through this process. Later, you can compare these groups with the actual outcome. For now, we’ll do an exercise that will increase your team’s awareness of preconceived ideas so you can set them aside during task-based segmentation.

State audience preconceptions. Go around the table and ask each team member for the names of the groups they think

you should interview. Write the initial group names from each team member on the whiteboard or in shared notes — you can be informal about describing the groups. Ask people to mention sources where appropriate. This is your list of preconceptions.

When the JMS team started their project, each team member had different preconceived notions. Jane thought that the movie rating system established by the Motion Picture Association of America would provide good audience segmentation: “G” (General Audiences) for children, “R” (Restricted) for adults, “PG-13” (Parents Strongly Cautioned) for young teens, and so on. These groups are based on demographic segmentation by age.

Joseph, however, said he’d segment the audience members according to the type of movies they prefer to watch, such as action movies, foreign or art films, romance, horror, and science fiction. These groups are based on psychographic segmentation by preference.

Katherine said she would segment by the reason a person sees a movie: to travel the world without leaving home, to escape reality, to see what non-mainstream directors have to say about humanity, to evaluate a movie in comparison to others, and so on. These segments are closer to task-related categories.

Once your team has come up with its segment names, look over the list. As you begin to develop a fresh perspective, you’ll want to avoid group names that are based on demographics, psychographics, and so on. Think of them as triggers that will pull you back into old modes of thinking.

Six Easy Steps



Step 2. Brainstorm TasksNow we’ll begin to think about what your users do. This is called task analysis, which is the process of stating, breaking down into atomic parts, grouping, and summarizing tasks that a person completes to achieve a goal.

When you perform task analysis with people in your company, you aren’t yet gathering real data from real customers. The people on your team indicate tasks based on their combined experience with customers. The audience segments you create using task-based segmentation will be based on data filtered through your perception of what real customers are doing.

Projects based solely on in-house task analysis have several errors, because employees can’t think of absolutely everything customers do. This is fine. Remember that this is a technique for determining who you should study, not a technique for defining the tasks around which you should build your product. You’ll verify your results with real research from your customers later.

Now that everyone has sworn not to use the segment names you already wrote down, you can begin brainstorming tasks.

List tasks. Think about all the things people do when they use your product. In our example, the JMS team thought about going to the movies. “Get tickets” and “decide what movie to see” are among those, but what steps are involved in deciding what movie to see? Break the task down. To start with, people ask friends what movies they’ve seen recently, read reviews, and find out what’s playing in theaters. As you

think of each task, ask, “What comes before and after? What else is involved?” These questions will inspire more tasks.

At this stage, any idea is valuable because it might help someone else come up with a better name or phrase, so don’t criticize or reject an idea unless it’s a repeat.

Write tasks in verb + noun format. Write tasks in a consistent format, using a verb first and a noun second. A verb + noun format is important for two reasons. It gets you thinking in terms of actions — things that people are doing. Often this perspective is awkward at first because you may be used to thinking about what people need, or what they prefer. By putting the verb first, you put the emphasis on the task. For example, a user might go to several websites each Friday to read what the critics think of a particular movie. The person’s goal in this sentence is, “read reviews.” The verb + noun format clarifies that goal. Once you have your basic structure, you can describe the details. “Choose seats” becomes “choose seats in the middle of the theater.” (See Figure 1 for examples of task phrasing.)

Be exact in your word choices. “Get movie” could mean “rent a movie,” “buy a movie,” or “order a movie on demand.” It’s too ambiguous. The word “movie” itself could be referring to a film, a video, or a DVD. “Buy DVD” is a better task name, because it’s exact.

Five Rules of Task Generation1. For each task, ask,

“Is there more to it?”2. Write tasks in

verb+noun phrases.3. Use exact verbs.4. Do not prioritize.5. Record only the

tasks you know of other people doing.



Don’t prioritize yet. Some of the tasks you list may seem unimportant or irrelevant to your product. At this point in the process, don’t worry about the relative importance or priority of the tasks. Just go ahead and list them. Order doesn’t matter either, so don’t try to sort or group by task type. We’ll organize at a later stage.

Don’t say “I.” There’s a rule when conceiving of tasks: Do not refer to your own experience. Don’t say, “Well, I always buy popcorn.” Instead, think of examples of other people doing this task. The other people can be friends, family, or people you don’t know — people you’ve read about, watched on television, or seen in movie theaters. An internal point of view is not relevant for the process. You’re generating a set of tasks based on your perception of what your users do. Leaving yourself out of it will help keep personal bias to a minimum.

As you work, list every task you can think of on the Tasks tab of the spreadsheet. If you’re using sticky notes, write each idea on a separate piece of paper. This exercise will take about an hour, and you should be able to list 100-200 tasks. Once you have your tasks listed, you’re ready to figure out how they fit together.

Step 3. Group TasksAs you were brainstorming, you listed tasks as you thought of them. Now’s your chance to organize them. Go through your list and put related tasks side by side on the “T Groups” (for “Task Groups”) tab on the spreadsheet.

During this step you start building your tasks into a structure that will represent what your audience is actually doing.

Highlight and copy some tasks. Highlight several tasks that seem related to one another. Team members can be looking at different columns to help call out tasks related to the topic at hand. Copy highlighted tasks to the “T Groups” tab in the spreadsheet. Then return to this page and change the font color of the copied tasks, to indicate that you’ve already copied them.

Group related tasks, and label the group. As you’ll see in Figure 2, the JMS team highlighted tasks that seemed to be about picking which movie to see. At first they put them all in one group, and were about to label it “choose a film,” when they realized that “find out what’s playing in theaters” isn’t really about picking the movie, but about discovering what’s out there. The task “ask friends what movies they’ve seen lately” also has to do with discovering movies you don’t know about. “Read movie reviews” relates to getting information about movies you haven’t seen. So they pulled this set of three tasks out and put them in a group labeled “seek information about movies you haven’t seen.”

The team also pulled the two tasks about film festivals and labeled them “go to a film festival.” These tasks felt related to “seek information about movies.” It’s possible that this particular group will change later, based on other tasks the team finds. That’s okay, expect the task groups to change as you work through the process.

On the “T Groups” tab, where you’ve copied the related tasks, move them into groups. You’ll have to experiment, but once



Figure 1: Brainstorm tasks as verb+noun phrases.



Figure 2: Highlighting related tasks.



you’re satisfied with a group, label it with a title in bold font. This label should also be a verb + noun phrase. (See Figure 3.)

Consider adjusting tasks or groups. Grab a few more tasks, paste them onto your “T Groups” tab, and see if you can fit them into your current groups. The JMS team copied the task, “Choose a film because of the special effects.” This new task caused them to rearrange their groups slightly. They wanted to add it to “choose film based on something familiar,” but the title wasn’t quite right. After thinking about it, they couldn’t invent a title for these five tasks together, which was an indication that they needed to split the group.

The team looked for common elements within the tasks. “Special effects” goes with “director” and “composer” more than with “book” or “actor/actress.” Why? Because a director, a composer, and special effects all work behind the scenes of a story. The book is the story, and the actor/actress play out the story. So they split out “Pick movie based on book you read” and “Pick movie based on actor/actress,” and renamed the group. (See Figure 4.)

If a task is too vague for you to group, rewrite the task more clearly. If it can mean two different things, split it into two separate tasks. If you think of a new task, add it to the proper group. Don’t bother adding this new task to the Tasks tab since each tab builds upon the one before it. You won’t be going back to the task tab once everything is grouped.

When you’re finished grouping all of your tasks, the group

labels become your new set of tasks. You’ve effectively reduced the number of overall tasks by about half, because now you’ll be dealing with task groups, not individual tasks. You’ve also had a chance to review your list several times, making sure it includes a breadth of tasks.

Step 4. List Performers By Task GroupIn the forth step of the task-based segmentation process, you’ll consider people who do the tasks, and begin to draw out similarities between types of people. In this step, you’ll come up with a first pass at audience definitions. Later, you’ll have a chance to hone them, so be creative for now.

Copy group titles. Copy the bolded task-group titles that you created during Step 3 to the “Performers” tab of the spreadsheet. List each group title in the first column. The order of the titles doesn’t matter yet, so you can list them in the same order as they appeared originally.

Fill in performer names. For each task, fill in the type of person who performs this task at the top of the skinny column (see Figure 5). Start with an easy task, like, “choose a film based on a familiar character.” Who performs this task? The JMS team thought it would be a child or book reader, and wrote them both down. Mark an “x” in the row for each of the audience names that fit this task.

For “choose film based on director/composer/effects,” the JMS team thought of “director/composer fan,” and “someone



Figure 3: Group tasks and create verb + noun titles.



Figure 4: Reorganize groups.



who goes to the movies because of the technical parts, like special effects or cinematography.” Of course that last name is too long, so they shortened it to “technical moviegoer.”

Skip down the list of tasks until you find an easy one that makes you think of different people. For “choose film based on actor/actress,” the JMS team added the name “actor/actress fan.” For “arrange transportation to theater,” they added “dating” and “person who is arranging for a group to meet at the theater.” Maybe that person is a parent, a co-worker arranging a celebration, or a teenager who has the car for the night. The team changed that last title to “group entertainment organizer.”

Then the team skipped to “get discount tickets.” Who would do this? Probably a “parent bringing a child” or a “friend bringing a friend.” Of course the dating folks or the group-entertainment organizer might also buy discount tickets, so the team marked an x for each of them, too.

Sometimes we redefine a type of performer. When the JMS team looked at “sneak into theater,” they thought of a child, but not a young child — perhaps a teenager with friends. Maybe one kid has paid for a ticket and lets someone else in the back door. Or maybe two or three kids together sneak into another theater in a multiplex. So they refined “child” into a second group, “youth with friends.” This person might also need to “arrange transportation to theater.” As you move through the process, skip around until you don’t see any more tasks that are easily matched with your list of performers.

At this stage, remain relaxed about your audience types. You’ll adjust and redefine these groups in Step 6, so indicate a wide range of people for now. This will ensure that the results of Step 6 are based on a broad foundation. The more people you define in this step, the more aspects you can tie together in the next two steps, so that the resulting audiences are more easily differentiated.

As you add performers, you can easily review and adjust the list of names. Try to make each performer name distinct from the other entries while still ensuring that you cover a wide range.

When you’re finished identifying performers for the easy tasks, look over the more difficult tasks. For each one, ask whether a particular performer does that task. For example, for the task “seek information about movies he or she hasn’t seen,” ask if a child would do this. No, probably not. Does a movie snob seek information about movies he or she hasn’t seen? Yes, probably.

As you move horizontally across the row, you’ll eventually develop a matrix that looks like Figure 6.

Step 5. Group PerformersIn this next stage we’ll look at the patterns of x’s in the rows and try to match them up. This will likely take several passes, which means there will be a lot of cutting and pasting. A projector comes in handy here. With the whole team present

Does This Performer Do This Task?

Mark an x for these answers: Yes, possibly, definitely, might, could be, sure.

Leave the cell blank for these answers: No, doubt it, not necessarily, probably not.



Figure 5: Performers table, with task group names on left and performer names across the top.



for the exercise, it’s less likely that the keyboard operator will forget something without someone catching the mistake.

Collect rows with sparse x’s. At this point, you should copy the entire table to a new tab in the spreadsheet. You’ll find an example in the “P Groups” (for Performer Groups) tab in the spreadsheet. On the new page, look for rows with the least number of x’s, and move these rows next to each other at the top of the page. It doesn’t matter whether the x’s match up, just collect the sparse rows for now (see Figure 7).

Collect rows with the nearly solid x’s. Rows with almost all x’s filled in are universal tasks, and you can move them to the bottom of the page. They won’t influence your segmentation, because they’re things that everyone does. Technically, you could copy and paste these “universal” tasks into every segment you come up with. To save you effort, just collect them and ignore them.

Group similar patterns of x’s. Now that the easy rows are finished, look at the rows with more complex patterns of x’s. You can move rows next to each other to compare how the x’s match up vertically. Do this until you start to see different groups forming. You might want to leave a blank row between groups.

The JMS team selected a task from the list, “put together a model from a movie,” and looked at the horizontal pattern of x’s (see the first line in Figure 8). There are three, then a space, then one-space-one, then a big space, and then a trailing x at the end. They scanned the x’s below this task mainly concentrating on finding rows that began with three x’s. They found that “trade

memorabilia with friends” started with three x’s. The team was excited to see the one-space-one pattern following. There were two trailing x’s though. Close enough. They moved “trade memorabilia with friends” up under “put together a model from a movie.”

Next the team saw that “collect memorabilia” had a similar pattern, and they moved it up, too. “Dream of being a character in the movie” had three x’s in the beginning and a trailing x, but not the pattern of one-space-one. And the trailing x was in a different column than our set so far. So they put “Dream of being a character in the movie” in a separate group, below the first set they were building.

When the JMS team finished looking for the triple-x pattern, they selected another task, “go to movies alone,” and started looking for similar patterns. As they worked, they saw some sets grow, and others they took apart and redistributed. It was hard to make a decision in many cases. If there was a big difference, they made a new set. If it was close enough, they kept the tasks together in one set. Later, they’ll have a chance to validate their sets.

Verify patterns and make adjustments. Look at the vertical pattern of x’s for each column in a task group. If there are five or more x’s in a column for that group, highlight them and set their background color, as in Figure 9. Columns with four or fewer x’s can be considered outliers. Now that the patterns are easier to distinguish, you can compare them between task groups.

During this part of the exercise, you’ll probably see that you put a few rows in the wrong groups because it was hard



Figure 6: Matrix with tasks and performers.



to see the patterns clearly in the first pass. If this happens, move these rows to the group that they actually match.

After you’re satisfied with the patterns you’ve isolated, you can move to Step 6 and define the groups. These newly defined groups will become your audience segments.

Step 6. Define Audience SegmentsIn this stage, you’ll define your audience segments based on the patterns you identified in Step 5. Be generous with your ideas at first, your team will refine them later.

Organize the information for easy visualization. Copy each group of tasks that you made in the “P Groups” tab to the “Audience Segments” tab in the spreadsheet. Paste them in the first column, then list all the performers for each group of tasks in the next column — based on the information on the previous tab. Leave a line between each group. This layout will help you visualize whom you are describing for each group.

Brainstorm segment names. For each group, think of some names, adjectives, or attributes to describe these people. Write your ideas in the third column (see Figure 10). Include all suggestions in this column, nothing is irrelevant at this point.

When you do this exercise, some people will be more creative than others. On the JMS team, for example, Joseph came up with phrases like “raging hormones” and “groupie.” Katherine would offer descriptions, like, “lives in another world” or “controls the experience.”

Finalize names. Now it’s time to decide on a single name for each group. One way to do this is by simply holding a vote. If you like two similar names, consider combining them. Write the names you decide on in the dividing lines (see Figure 11). There are six groups in our example. You can see what the JMS team decided to call them in the “Audience Segments” tab of the spreadsheet.

Collect business data. In most cases, it’s unnecessary to study all of your audience segments. You may find that you already have enough data about one group, or that another makes up such a small percentage of overall profit and/or service that they can be ignored for now. Also, it’s often the case that companies don’t have enough resources to study more than a few segments at a time.

In the next column, list any business data regarding overall profit, service, or other quarterly or annual goals that apply to each segment. If you don’t have business stakeholders on your team, then you may have to collect this data. Ask about business objectives, determine which internal stakeholders are invested in the product you’re creating, and coordinate their responses. Your

The Magic Number?

I used the threshold of five x’s in my example. Your situation may require a different threshold. The threshold depends on two things: the number of tasks in a set, and the number of x’s in a typical column. Your goal is to corral as many x’s as makes sense. If you have a set with 17 tasks, and most of the vertical columns have seven or more x’s in them, and the other columns have four or two x’s, then your threshold should be seven. The vertical columns with few x’s in them should be in the minority. You want to capture the majority of the x’s.



Figure 7: Tasks with few x’s at the top of the page.



Figure 8: Finding patterns of x’s.



company may have other internal resources for data collection, such as customer service reps or field sales. Reach out to everyone in the company for business objective and customer-related data. Ask the marketing department for any information they have about your customers. See if you can map demographics-based information to the audience segments you’ve developed.

Decide which segments to study. For JMS Entertainment, data collected by the marketing department indicates which demographic segments are the largest source of income. The JMS team associated one of their audience segments, the Make-Believe Artist, with a market segment that isn’t a big contributor to profit (mostly young children). Sales of related memorabilia, while not directly contributing to JMS profit, certainly influence the profitability of a release. So they listed the Big Fan and the Film Purist segments as a source of income in “related products.”

Find out what resources are available for your upcoming study. In our example, the team could cut Big Fans from the study, if necessary, because the data says that the profit in related products is not as big as that for Film Purist. Enter a summary of this data in the next column. (See Figure 12.)

Once you know which segments you want to study, you must determine how many people you’ll interview for your study. This will depend upon the methodology you’ll be using. The JMS team is planning to conduct interviews to do task analysis research. Because task analysis is qualitative, and because patterns in the data tend to emerge after about three interviews per segment, they should include anywhere from

three to six people per segment. They have four segments they wish to study, so the team chooses three people per segment, for a total of 12 participants. If JMS Entertainment had a reason to emphasize one segment over another, the team would recommend more people from a certain segment.

Enter the number of participants per segment in the final column next to the highest priority audience segments.

Moving ForwardFor the example we have used throughout this report, the team will proceed to interview these participants about their movie-viewing goals and how they reach those goals. This data will help the JMS team discover how, or whether, to design the new website for JMS Entertainment.

After your study, adjust the segments. At the beginning of this exercise, when you conceived of tasks, you weren’t working with actual field data. Once you complete your study, you may realize that things are different

How Non-Profits Prioritize Segments

For those of you in non-profit environments, this step is just as necessary as it is for those with profit as a goal. It helps you specify which audience segments are most important to your organization. Naturally, you’ll want to say, “All of our audiences are important.” However, if you study how these segments relate to your mission statement, you may see that audiences are important in different ways, and the application you’re creating may serve these audiences in different ways as well.

What’s more, for most non-profits, it may be especially difficult to obtain resources to study more than a few segments at a time, making prioritization a necessity.



Figure 9: For readability, highlight the patterns within a task set.



Figure 10: Brainstorm names, adjectives or attributes.



Figure 11: The best name for each segment.



Figure 12: Decide which segments to study.



than you imagined. You’ll need to corroborate your original segments against your new information, and make adjustments.

Perhaps many of the participants say, “When it’s hot and humid outside, I go to the movies because it’s air conditioned. I choose the movie with the longest playing time.” The “cool off in the theater” task would be one that the JMS team missed in its brainstorming session. How does it fit in with the audience segments? If other people say, “When I’m at the mall, I’ll sometimes go to a movie to wait out a bad storm before I head home,” then maybe there is a whole new segment of people who go to the movies to escape the weather.

Alternately, the JMS team may find out that Film Purists and Movie Buffs have so much in common that the team can effectively group them together. Maybe the all the people they talk to have elements of the Facilitator in them, so it’s necessary to recruit some Facilitators to see how, and if, they are different.

ConclusionA successful product or website helps users accomplish their goals, and task-based segmentation helps you figure out whose goals you should aim to fulfill. Once you understand how your audience thinks about completing tasks, the tools you provide can be much more attuned to their needs.

It’s easy to waste thousands of dollars studying off-base user groups. Task-based segmentation ensures that you’re focusing

on the most relevant users for a particular project. It gives you the freedom to explore your entire solution space, instead of simply iterating old products and ideas. It gives direction to your product development cycle, and saves investment capital that would otherwise be squandered on a sparse data set.

About Adaptive PathAdaptive Path advises organizations on user experience strategies, helping them realize the maximum value from their product design and development investments. The company’s founders are recognized around the world as industry leaders. Adaptive Path also shares its experience and expertise through publications, public workshops, and private corporate training.

Adaptive Path’s clients include Sony, PBS, Yamaha, PeopleSoft, Cathay Pacific, and the United Nations. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

363 Brannan StreetSan Francisco, CA 94107+1-415-495-8270

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About the authorIndi Young is a founding partner and practice lead of Adaptive Path, the world’s premier user experience consulting company. She has been consulting for over a decade, and is creator of the acclaimed mental model diagram and gap analysis process. Indi’s past clients include Agilent, PeopleSoft, and Charles Schwab.

Indi is an applications and navigation guru who began her work in Web applications in 1995. Her clients range from technology start-ups to large financial institutions. Projects include global corporate intranets, consumer finance and investment tools, enterprise software lead generation sites, knowledge management tools, workflow applications, and business-to-business e-commerce.

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