Understand the user is vital to creating immersive experience to suit them. With research, discovering my target audience would be adults between 24 and 45 years old, I need to create a website that is accessible and easy to use whilst still creating desire to attend the exhibition. Also it is worth noting that to create a suitable marketing campaign, it is absolutely vital that I fully understand my target audience.
To maximize the sales of the exhibition, the success of the website, I must concentrate on marketing meaning that I create a brand around the exhibition and get people talking about it, something that was suggested by top marketer Sean Dromgoole at his TedX talk about “the future of marketing”.
Since the purpose and goals of the site were to sell exhibition tickets, I needed to cover as broader spectrum as possible therefore it was important to keep the audience very diverse in gender, age, education level and work experience. I would need the user to visit the site for the purpose of finding out more about the exhibition but then to buy tickets while they were there. For this reason I need the site to work on every device and every browser in aim to stop myself from loosing sales beside on the website design and build. The user will be one of two categories, encouraged by the element of making money by turning base metals to gold and the other group would simply be interested in learning more about alchemy on a factual level.
References;
Kar Yan Tam , Shuk Ying Ho, Web Personalization as a Persuasion Strategy: An Elaboration Likelihood Model Perspective, Information Systems Research, v.16 n.3, p.271-291, September 2005
Alfred Kobsa, Generic User Modeling Systems, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.11 n.1-2, p.49-63, 2001
Sung Min Bae , Sung Ho Ha , Sang Chan Park, Fuzzy Web Ad Selector Based on Web Usage Mining, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.18 n.6, p.62-69, November 2003
http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html