Testing & Improving Communities and Websites

Established off line industries already know everything about their customers and clients and have well developed psychological profiles, so they are pretty successful at selling their products and services. Websites and online sites also need psychological profiles of their visitors and customers to be effective and in business.

Why Make a Psychological Profile?

It allows you to make decisions easier. If you know the your
visitors come to your website to satisfy three different needs, than
you’ll know what to hit on when designing and developing your site.

Getting better results. You will not waste time and resources on
activities that get substandard results. You won’t preach mountain
biking to geeks or car racing to nerds.

Components of a Psychological Profile

You have to write down the thinking processes that occur in your
visitor’s heads when they use your site. What are they thinking when
they click on this button or that link? You need to know the difference
in psychological needs of a Google visitor and a repeat visitor and
treat each differently.

Don’t fly with your blinders on. Start with a basic psychological
profile of your site visitors and keep that in mind when building and
developing your site. As you get more feedback from what works and what
doesn’t and from usage and after action questionnaires, you’ll be able
to modify this profile and further tone your messages to hit spot on
with your target visitors and customers.

Psychologically Profiling of Your Site Visitors – Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com

Ain’t this the truth.  It rounds off the whole idea that you MUST listen to the needs of the community in order for it to survive and grow.  Thanks OKdork!