I research the target audiences and determine user goals for the project to help create user experiences that work well. Generational studies and marketing surveys give a high-level understanding, while analytics provides a more focused understanding on the when, where and how the user visits the website.
In general, user research helps provide insight into fulfilling brand emotions, creating a clear user experience, and building successful marketing campaigns. Personas, which document a name, face and short description about fictitious individuals, provide a representation of the target audiences. Each persona focuses on a specific scenario in which the website becomes the solution to one of their problems. This helps to solidify the exact steps and conditions for building a pleasant user experience as well as identify key pain points in existing websites.
