Market Segments and Their Information Needs

CDP Advisory Council
January 1999

Introduction

In January, 1999, the CDP Advisory Council held a meeting to address one of the most fundamental questions to ask in any digitization project: Who are our users? Five broadly-defined user segments were defined at this meeting, as listed below. These tables briefly define the user type and suggest what content they might be interested in, thoughts on the design of an interface, display capabilities, system design, or method of delivering digital resources that might suit their needs, and possible modes of retrieving these digital resources for each user group.

The CDP has included this table to help project participants define their audience as they plan digitization projects. Institutions may want to engage in a similar process of identifying the user groups their project intends to serve, the information needs of these groups, and the best way to serve their needs. Of course, audiences you may not have anticipated prior to the project may become a new user segment interested in the resources you are delivering, or audiences currently underserved may now be served in the Web environment.

Areas to consider in identifying how to serve your users may include:

• Modes of access that may be familiar to a user group
• Search features that will be of use to them
• Meaningful ways of displaying search results
• Ways of browsing resources that may be useful (by subject? date?)
• How users may want to use the information (print it out? view on screen?)
• Information or interpretive context about the scope and nature of the digital resources

Casual User | Student/K-12/Lifelong Learner | Information Seeker/Hobbyist
Scholar/Researcher | Business Community