Youth between the ages of 18 and 35 — are a unique group of consumers. They tend to be socially fluid and highly connected, emotionally searching for their identities, and mentally fickle and creative. How can you engage these youngsters online? By applying four design approaches: social interactivity, immediacy, literacy, and individualism.
Provide the ability to communicate with others. To youth, media and content aren't resources for passive consumption. They're pieces of sharable conversations. Enabling communication and content sharing encourages youth to include content from sites in their online conversations.
Offer tools for self-expression. Youth aren't satisfied just consuming content. They want to create their own. Companies need to find ways to embrace these users' creativity and satisfy their need for self-expression.
For most companies and brands, it doesn't make sense to try to redesign an entire site to provide better youth experiences. Instead, customer experience professionals need to identify the most likely activities that youth will be doing on their sites. How can they do this? Execute a simple survey asking people what they're trying to do on the site, and then look at the responses. With more sophisticated analytics, you can also identify the most frequent paths these young users take.
Firms looking to engage younger users with social interactivity should ask two simple questions about the experiences on their sites: 1) Does it provide the ability to communicate with others? and 2) Does it offer tools for self-expression? By asking these two questions in the context of relevant user goals, brands can identify places to increase social interactivity. You can then draw on the best practices of other firms and other industries to take advantage of the opportunities.
No comments:
Post a Comment