User discussion

Who is the user?

Due to the subject of the site, a singer of the late 60’s, our audience should be mainly people who were around 10 and 35 years old in late 60’s, so about 40 to 65 years old today. However, we can expect some younger people who generally discovered Joplin through their parents, by example by listening disks their parents listened to at the same age.

Concerning the gender, at first glance as many males than females. Janis Joplin wasn’t a “sex-singer”; she was even qualified of « most handsome man » when she was at College… (in comparison with Britney Spear nowadays who attracts a lot of male fans not only for the quality of her songs….), so the fact she is a woman doesn’t mean she attracts more males. One of the best qualities of Joplin’s song in certainly the hardiness of sensation she can communicate. To my mind, I’m afraid that women are more sensible to this point. On the other hand, a number of her songs are “rock” which again in my opinion, is more appreciated by male. Finally, according to a study of Jupiter Media Matrix published in February 2002, 29% of European Internet users are females, 49% in Canada/USA and halfway in UK with 42%. So if I would have expected a little more of females due to the subject of this web site, general female representation on the Internet make me think that the audience should be fifty-fifty.

The cultural background is clearly occidental, as Janis Joplin is part of the “hippies” movement which born in the USA and extended in Europe.

What does the user want?

As any fan site, we can discern two types of profiles:
 fans, typically who own 50 rare records and read about 4 biographical books.
 people who have simply heard of Janis, have been fan 30 years ago and would like to remind this era in a nostalgic movement, or simply for young people to get an overview of the context of this music.

I don’t think both profiles are compatible inside the same site, that’s why I chose to target the second audience. Nevertheless, big fans will be able to follow links to biggest sites which should more satisfy them. The benefits is that “novice-fan” won’t be drown under a mountain of information (for instance Joplin’s sites used to present her autopsy report, which is… not really exciting for everybody!).

Content

As said before, I don’t want to supply a collection of resources about Janis Joplin, but simply to provide an overview of her life and artistic work. First, the site should offer a biography of Janis, not to short but above all not to long as it could become boring for non-fans! Secondly, the site must contain a discography section. Here too, I don’t want to furnish a long list of rare live records (there are several hundreds) so I restrict to official albums, excluding live and best-of disks. As I don’t think that an album cover and a list of titles are efficient to give envy to listen to music, some sound samples would be welcome. Then, some galleries of pictures should say longer about hippie’s context than any text. So I’ll put some. Finally, a selection of web sites to escape, or rather to extend the trip in Janis’s world if my site achieve its goal : to make visitor interested in Janis Joplin.

Usually fan sites incorporate more advanced sections like a timeline, but to my mind it’s more boring than interesting to read when you’re not a big fan.

User skills and knowledge

We have seen that the major part of our audience is middle-aged people and more, a part of the internet population which is generally not comfortable with IT technologies (I have conducted a small study two years ago about middle-aged people and IT technologies which make me affirm this). This means we have to be careful, not to try to innovate in design or navigability but still in a classic way, in short to correctly apply the basic guidelines of user interface!

A typical example would be popup windows : I’ve several times observed that novice middle-aged people don’t know how to deal with them and generally will simply ignore them. In fact we should avoid to open any secondary window or launch any program.

Moreover, this category of people are seldom last-technology-adepts, which means that we really have to consider compatibility with old hardware and software : for example our audience should have lowest screen resolution that the internet users average (they haven’t yet replaced their 15 inches screen to the latest 19 inches flat screen…), or also use a 2 years-old browser. In the same idea, they’re certainly not equipped with popular plugins and software like Flash, QuickTime, RealAudio and other; and it would be a bad idea to force them installing this if we want to keep them on our site!

Meanwhile we can expect to have younger visitors. As long as we used good guidelines there’s nothing special to take care, except maybe to have a nice look because I guess that young people are more sensible to attractive design where more mature people would rather take care of the content.