Customer-Centered Design: A New Approach to Web Usability

Needs Assessment Process

There are five main steps in assessing online customer needs:

• Observing and listening to customers
• Reviewing market segmentation and customer profiling
• Analyzing current buying behaviors and online customer needs
• Defining user interface requirements
• Formulating value proposition and branding objectives

It is this collective knowledge that makes up the body of customer intelligence.

Listening for the “Important Stuff”

Putting together a good customer-needs picture includes understanding the influences, physical environment, sequences, and life flow patterns. From this, you can create customer modeling that represents the needs based on the customer's behavior. After you have identified your target customers, you need to build ...