{"id":22690,"date":"2016-10-13T08:30:25","date_gmt":"2016-10-13T13:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.crowdspring.com\/?p=22690"},"modified":"2023-06-26T18:50:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T23:50:24","slug":"psychographics-the-key-to-effective-ux-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crowdspring.com\/blog\/psychographics-the-key-to-effective-ux-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychographics: The Key to Effective UX Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8384110298_da510e0347_b\"<\/p>\n

Image Source: Flickr<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Marketing has long been a space dominated by conversations about demographics.<\/p>\n

Ask someone in the field to describe their target audience, and the most consistent elements will be rather general and ubiquitous delineations we apply to people: gender, age, income, career, and the like.<\/p>\n

This information is, undoubtedly, important, if only because data on such groups and their behavior is far more readily available. And at the end of the day, some customization is better than none.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to design, demographics can fall woefully short in terms of generating meaningful insights.<\/p>\n

Not every 30-something woman making a healthy living as an accountant feels and thinks the same way, and while design is most certainly an element of a platform or application’s function, it’s also a form of psychological influence via the aesthetic.<\/p>\n

Demographics, unfortunately, don’t tell us much about\u00a0psychology — not reliably, at least.<\/p>\n

The psychology of a 30 year old female accountant with six kids, a strict Catholic upbringing, recent losses in the family, and an underwater mortgage is going to be different than that of a 30 year old female accountant who has never married, owns her condo outright, subscribes to pluralism, and is a proponent of marijuana legalization.<\/p>\n

On paper, they’re part of the same group. In life, they have very, very, very different motivations, preferences, pain points, and perceptions of reward.<\/p>\n

In theory, one could get intensely granular on demographics and try to come up with a rudimentary psychological profile for the buyer.<\/p>\n

But in order for that to occur in most cases, one would have to focus in myopic fashion on a sliver of an audience, which isn’t very useful when you need to design something for use by your entire audience.<\/p>\n

When conducting marketing research, if you want your design to really resonate with your audience, ditch the demographics in favor of psychographics.<\/p>\n

While demographics looks at relatively static and quantifiable characteristics, psychographics pay attention to the behaviors, interests, attitudes, and lifestyles of the individuals in question.<\/p>\n

The goal is not to determine\u00a0who\u00a0<\/em>someone is, but\u00a0how\u00a0<\/em>they are. And given that a user experience is, at the end of the day,\u00a0how\u00a0<\/em>someone interacts with your brand via a specific medium, understanding how they typically behave and make decisions is of much greater value than what buckets they might fall into on a census.<\/p>\n

Want a free brand review?<\/div>
\"brand<\/div>
Answer 5 short questions and we will send a custom report with actionable insights and specific actions you can take to build a stronger brand.<\/div>
\n