In a general sense it can be argued our target audience is anybody who has an interest in design and its history. This as our range would be too inaccurate so it will need defining down a bit more. In a blog written for 29 Design Studio, they claim that the more you define your audience, the better you will be able to provide personalised content. With this in mind when thinking about our target audience here if we take the original statement of “anybody with an interest in design and break it down we can start with an age range. By acknowledging the type of content we will be including and the nature of the subject of our webpage, we can realise that a reasonable target would aim for those in the higher education range. We can adjust one demographic of the target audience by looking into the average age of university students.
According to data collected by Higher Education Student Data (HESA) the age range of students in higher education that is most represented is those of age 20 and under. Importantly, students aged 30 and over only make up 22% of the population. With this information it is reasonable to suggest a more narrow age range for our target audience to be of the ages 18-29.
Currently the refined target audience is now 18-29 students in higher education with an interest in design. Here we are acknowledging the age, education, and interests of our target audience. Before continuing we must decide if this can be refined further by considering the reasoning this new defined user would be observing our web page. Is it academic or more out of interest; a hobby search. By taking the assumption this is more a journey of interest we can already take an assumption of a more casual environment. Which in turn could offer a more artistic way of expression within the webpage. With that proposal a final interpretation of the target audience is, 18-29 year old students in higher education studying a design degree, who like to explore topics on design in their spare time.
With the audience decided, we need to define and establish the stakeholders and how we can consider success from their perspective. Acknowledging the Audience we can view and extend that our stakeholders for this webpage could consist of the original authors of works used; their view would be one of a hopefully authentic representation and credit of their work and an assumption that their assets were not being used in a harmful way towards the source. Another stakeholder to be considered are those in a teaching profession that may want to use the web page as a point of reference, or as a material in a topic of teaching. In this regard they would consider success to be a high quality informative and correct representation of the design subject being presented.