Customer/audience segmentation is one of the most important parts of marketing user studies, but what is the best way to go about this process? A 2022 research study found that researchers frequently do not define their study participants in adequate detail, which is a disconcerting finding.
Best practices will advise you to focus on segmentation by age, gender, nationality, education, occupation, or income. These are excellent foundations for beginning any user study and help answer the question of who, but they all fall under the umbrella of demographic segmentation, which is only one of four main types of segmentation
Geographic (the where), psychographic (the why), and behavioral (the how) segmentation add more specificity to a study. For instance, if you were attempting to recruit participants for an eye-tracking study using Metric to understand better what aspects of your landing page customers fixate on, your recruitment requirements would need a psychographic element that addresses the participants’ physical abilities. You would need to know if they wear glasses, are partially or fully visually impaired, suffer from night blindness, or have any form of amblyopia (lazy eye), as these can affect the results of your study and perhaps give you some insights into how much of your audience needs to be specially catered to.
There are, of course, many other subtypes of market segmentation, such as technographic, transactional, firmographic (b2b), and generational/life stage segmentation, but ultimately, it’s important not to get entirely caught up on the types but rather focus on the kinds of questions these segmentation types can help you answer, depending on what you need for your market research. It is important to remember that these are not mutually exclusive and can be used collaboratively to achieve the desired level of specificity for the study.
Read more research about sample selection!
Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., Kamel, A., Froneman, W., and Jansen, B. J. (2022) Who is in the sample? An analysis of real and surrogate users as participants in user study research in the information technology fields. PeerJ Computer Science. 8:e1136 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1136
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