Audience Analysis

Putting Ourselves in Someone Else’s Shoes

“Know your audience” is a standard rule of writing, and Henning shows how that applies to technical communicators. By looking at your project from the point of view of the end user, Henning illustrates, you can provide a better document and improve your company’s bottom line as well.

A Few Thoughts on Documentation for the Power User

Power user. It’s a term that I don’t like. But there definitely are people out there who are working with the software and hardware that we document who want more than just basic information. Getting them that information can be tricky.

Audience Analysis: Power Tools for Technical Writing

Documents fail for many reasons. One common mistake is to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach to your audience. This works only when generic material, usually of a non-technical nature.

Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User

In this presentation, Joe Sokohl talks about gathering user research prior to designing and implementing your help deliverables.

Why You Need to Understand Your Readers Before You Start Writing

Knowing your document’s intended reading audience before you begin writing will always help you write more effective documentation. There are three simple questions you should always ask before you start writing.

User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models

This is not going to be an article about personas or even what distinguishes a good persona from a bad one. Instead, this article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis. First, however, let me briefly discuss what we generally mean when we talk about personas and the role they play in the design and development process.

Twitter, Tweetdeck and Simplicity

The usability of a website is relative to the audience that it was designed for. A website that is designed well for its primary audience will not necessarily provide a great user experience for everyone that tries to use it. It’s important to identify your target user if you’re going to make a site that works well for the right people.

Your Target Audience and Your Users

There is a difference between your target audience (who you want to reach) and your user-base (who actually uses your website). At least that’s the mental model I’ve always used when approaching web design.

Know Your Site

A good starting point for planning the future of your website is to analyze what you already have. To some extent we are doing this all the time. That is how new projects happen. However, a more formal approach helps to better inform your decision-making throughout the web project. There are two ways to better understand your current website: qualitative and quantitative.

Self-Education in UX and Working with User Research Data

What are some good ways to educate myself in User Experience?

The Road to Personas

Who are your users? How do they work? How do your products fit into their routines? Filippo discusses audience analysis and developing user profiles to create effective user assistance.

Things I Learned the Hard Way: Ignore the Content

The next time someone complains to you, try to ignore the content of the complaint and address the emotion behind it instead. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can convert the haters to lovers and make your site better at the same time.

Making Web Space for Young Adults: Issues and Process a Case Study of the Internet Public Library Teen Division

This paper will discuss the issues associated with the creation of useful, appropriate, and entertaining Web space for teenagers, in the context of the formation of the Internet Public Library (IPL) Teen Division during the fall and winter of 1995.

Thirteen Common Objections Against User Requirements Analysis

Outlines some common objections to doing user research and provides some defense against them.

What Does Your Audience Want?

Successful visual designers well know the audiences they are designing for, and realize that their audiences exist at multiple levels.

Web Log Analysis

Getting to know your audience is key to designing a successful website. Because your audience may be spread around the world, learning about the users of your site may be quite a challenge. Even if you think you have a pretty good idea of who your audience is, in many cases, there's a lot of information that you won't know--for example, what browsers your users are using, whether or not they are connecting from on or off campus, or what pages they find most useful.

What's Important to Measure on Your Website?

Websites are very measurable. However, reams of data can be time consuming and confusing. The knack is to know what is really important to measure. This includes the following: reader actions; reader numbers; most and least popular pages; subscribers; external links; search keywords; page size; broken links and malfunctioning processes.

Are You Using the Wrong Web Metrics?

Do you base success on measuring the volume of visitors and page impressions? Such measures may in fact reflect the failure--rather than the success--of your website.

Measuring User Motivation from Server Log Files

Estimating user interest and motivation by just counting page requests from a World Wide Web server log (or "hits") provides a distorted metric of user activity. Some of the reasons why this metric is unreliable are that the path dependent nature of hyperlink usability treats index and navigational aid pages as equal to the goal, because differenes in web browsers can determine how effectively users can percieve content and navigational alternatives, and because the poorly designed structure and content of the documents themselves can inhibit users from finding what they are looking for. This paper proposes that measures of how much time users spend looking at a page are better estimates of user interest than page hits, providing simple human factors principles have been applied. An extended example of how this method might be used to collect and analyze data is also included. The types of decisions that can be made by authors and system administrators based on a time-based metric of user interest is summarized.

Why Web Usage Statistics are (Worse Than) Meaningless

Web usage statistics, such as those produced by programs such as analog cannot be used to make strong inferences about the number of people who have read a website or webpage. Although those who compile these statistics usually try to make this clear, people still insist on misusing them to make overly strong inferences. Attaching meaning to meaningless numbers is worse than not having the numbers at all. When you lack information, it is best to know that you lack the information. Web statistics may give the user a false sense of knowledge which can be worse than being knowingly ignorant.

Customer Focus: First Rule of Scientific Content Management

The science of content management begins with a deep understanding of your customer. The Web is more likely to push your customer away than to bring them closer.

Analyzing Your Traffic

Discover your site’s findability triumphs and tragedies with traffic analysis systems.

Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations

Deep down below the layers of interface, CSS, HTML, and XML—down where only the geekiest among us roam—everything comes down to this: it’s all zeroes and ones. On or off. The digital switch Though interaction and conversion becomes a bit more complicated at the point the interface meets the visitor, though there are a few more shades of gray, in the end it comes down to the same thing: yes or no.

Join the (User) Group

Here’s a complaint I’ve heard from most of the technical writers I’ve met: “I never get to meet my users.” User input helps us decide what content to include and in what form, and can confirm whether our books are effective. But getting user input can be difficult—at least I thought so, until I discovered a fun way to meet hundreds of users each year.

Simple Cognition Facts!

Sometimes users find it difficult to perform tasks based on the information provided. Take a minute to understand why this could happen.

Filtering and Withdrawing: Strategies for Coping with Information Overload in Everyday Contexts

The study investigates the ways in which people experience information overload in the context of monitoring everyday events through media such as newspapers and the internet. The findings are based on interviews with 20 environmental activists in Finland in 2005. The perceptions of the seriousness of problems caused by information overload varied among the participants. On the one hand, information overload was experienced as a real problem particularly in the networked information environments. On the other hand, information overload was perceived as an imagined problem with some mythical features. Two major strategies for coping with information overload were identified. The filtering strategy is based on the determined weeding out of material deemed useless. This strategy is favoured in networked information environments. The withdrawal strategy is more affectively oriented, emphasizing the need to protect oneself from excessive information supply by keeping the number of information sources to a minimum.

Remembering Your Reader in Web Design

Technology advancements have allowed for many improvements and enhancements in web design. Drastic changes have been made concerning programming, development, and available features. From flash animations, to blog pages, forums, and live chat, website designers have a multitude of design elements that can be added to their websites. Multimedia products such as audio, video, and podcasts are some of the other advancements in web design. One thing that has not changed, however, is the website readers. Successful website developers know and understand this concept, and apply it to every website that they design.

Selling Your Brand by Using Your Web Site as a Customer Research Tool

With companies moving business online, the Internet has become a source of profit for them. We all know how this works. You establish an online presence, sell your brand well—and you make money. Let’s rewind. We are selling our brands online, but doing it well is the challenge. To do it well, keep the following in mind: customer research is an important factor in generating business revenues, so it must be done right—that is, at the right place and at the right time; the online medium should not be the only way of gathering customer information; recognizing emerging trends—behavioral, demographic and emotional—helps companies move forward strategically.

Tips for Getting to Know Your Audience

Effective communication requires understanding the target population and how it operates. That need to understand runs the gamut: sometimes it's simply information gathering, other times it's copy testing, or it may mean monitoring the effectiveness of a campaign. But before you start any campaign, you need to know your audience.

Web Site Stats: A Look Behind The Numbers

In the dot.com boom of the 1990s, an electronic goldrush began as companies flocked like new age prospectors seeking to plant their stake in this digital revolution that has today transformed the ways companies communicate and do business around the globe. Because the web is becoming a viable communications channel, it's important that communications professionals understand how the content they're putting up on a web site is delivering to users the kind of value that is realizing a return on their investment.

Measuring the Influence of Blogs on Consumers, the Media and Corporate Reputation

According to the report "State of the News Media 2005" from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, "more than a third of Americans, some 36 percent, are regular consumers of four or more different kinds of news outlets—network news, local TV, newspapers, cable, radio, the Internet and magazines."

How Much Time Do You Spend in Web 2.0--Interesting Article from the Read/Write Web

Everyone has time to do what they want in Web 2.0; it's just a matter of priorities. I would say that I spend about 5-10 hours a week writing blog posts and producing podcasts. For people who have second jobs or who work 70 hrs a week, dedicating a lot of spare time to Web 2.0 is unlikely. Just curious about your thoughts. Do you feel you spend too much time in Web 2.0 activities? What would you like to be doing with your life instead?

Single-Source from the Reader's Point of View

Documentation written for single-sourcing (topic based, like that found in DITA) has great potential for efficiency. Writing once and publishing in many publications (Developer Guides, User Guides, etc.) and many formats (pdf, html, HTMLHelp, etc.) turns into cost and time savings. However, these efficiencies can cause inefficiencies for the users. Many online help users complain they cannot find the information they need while using the search function. Readers are more likely to comprehend texts with a classical book architecture, an architecture which is often sacrificed in single sourced documents and online Help files. When texts are cohesive, readers are more likely to consider information to be clear, well organized and easy to follow. For comprehensibility, it is essential to have a manual review, even when composing is partially automated.

Audience Matters

By incorporating usability techniques--more commonly used in product design--writers can better understand their audiences and the ways they use (or have problems using) the content. Read on for tips on how to incorporate usability techniques into your work.

Web Analytics: Insights From the Front Line, Part 2

2008 will see a more serious attempt to get Web analytics to become a part of business analytics. We're still a silo in most companies (data and people). We'll see more collaboration and innovation in helping Web data become a core part of the company data to truly give end-to-end visibility (and maybe the holy grail of multichannel analytics/impact).

Unsuspected Correlations Are Sweet!

Tracking web usage with a one dimensional mindset (or in a silo) means that you will end up missing so much of the picture.

Data Quality Sucks, Let's Just Get Over It

Data quality on the internet absolutely sucks. And there is nothing you can do about it. At least for now.

Actively Learning About Readers: Audience Modelling in Business Writing

The advantages of peer feedback in business writing classes are clear. Students receive more appraisals of their writing than any single lecturer can ever realistically deliver. Also, the feedback comes from different perspectives and sometimes carries extra credibility coming from fellow students. Students gain from giving one another feedback as well. It is certainly learning by doing. Critiquing the work of colleagues raises awareness of the many ways to approach a given task and demands skills of analysis and attention to detail. Delivering feedback also requires tact and the ability to look for positives to commend as well as areas to improve. Reviewing written documents is a skill that students will certainly use in their future work lives. However, many of us have experienced problems with peer reviewing. Students hesitate to criticise their friends and prefer praising in a general way rather than suggesting improvements, which requires confidence.

Users' Documentation Preferences

At a user group meeting in 2007, TechScribe researched users' experiences of the software documentation that they receive. Do they prefer online or printed documentation? Do they read the manual, or do they call the help desk? How important is background information? Which is more useful, a 'how to' user guide or a reference manual? Do people prefer explanations using visuals, descriptions, or a combination? Read the survey to find the answers (we obtained 29 responses from 64 attendees).

Engagement: Should We Care?

These days, the idea of customer engagement is almost as hot as Web 2.0--and almost as controversial. As busy UX professionals, should we invest our time and energy in caring about engagement, or is it just another buzzword? I think we do need to understand customer engagement, so that, at a minimum, we can respond intelligently to questions about it from marketers or executives. We might even glean some useful insights from thinking about engagement. This column aims to cut through the hype and reveal the potential value of engagement.

Some Stategies for Addressing the Changing Audience

'Know your user!' is the first thing every aspiring technical communicator learns. Everyone agrees that understanding the technical skills and needs of your audience is essential to producing high quality technical documentation. However, knowing exactly who your audience is and what they need from documentation is no longer an easy task. The increase in international markets, multiculturalism in America, end the number of people using software products for the first time all mean that the audience you knew so well a short time ago may not be the same audience using your documentation today. As technical communicators, we can no longer assume that our users' language and technical skills remain stable over a long period of time. How to assess and meet the needs of a changing audience is a challenge many technical communicators face today.

Understanding the Customer's Business Context

As an internal supplier of network and system management software, our organization faces significant challenges in assessing and enhancing the value of our products to customers. Traditionally, these types of products focus narrowly on meeting the technical needs of a single user constituency, without considering their impact on customers' overall business. This paper describes an ongoing project to investigate how to increase the perceived and actual value of our products by considering customers' business context. It describes how we got buy-in, what we learned about users and usability, and how we communicate our findings.

Analyzing Web-Based Help Usage Data to Improve Products

This paper describes how user assistance can streamline deliverables and improve product design by analyzing usage patterns from server-based content. We can then base decisions about how to improve deliverables on a thorough understanding of how customers use help content to find information and solve problems. This approach enables user assistance to add more value to both our companies and our customers by creating a three-way dialog between user assistance, the customer, and the product team. It also broadens the definition of assistance to include helping to design products that people can use without the need for instructions.

Design Success Through User Research and Iterative Testing

Intuit was faced with serious usability problems causing high support call volumes for one of its major payroll software products. Improving training and online help did not solve these usability problems. Results from research techniques such as usability studies and customer site visits supported a software interface redesign that raised performance as much as from 13% to 89% success for customers' most critical tasks (for novice users with no training). This paper describes how several different strategies combined to yield design success: using multiple data gathering techniques to converge on an understanding of customers' problems and details of software redesign, iteratively prototyping and testing until performance reached desired levels, and using diverse sources for design suggestions. Applicability of these strategies to other projects will be emphasized.

Get a Clue: Understanding the Who in Audience Analysis

This paper describes an interactive game that technical communicators in a department or project group can play to share each other's experience and discuss how to expand audience analysis with effective user data.

How Do Students and Practitioners (Actually) Analyze Users?

This paper reports on some disconnects between best practice teaching principles about user analysis and actual student practice. This research documents the facts of these disconnects and indicates some of their causes. Recommendations for academia and industry are offered. stereotypes to derive a model of audience. To what extent, however, does principle inform practice?

Serving Information Workers and Knowledge Workers

Information and knowledge workers are important users of technical communication products, but they do their work in different ways. Information work (i-work) follows a procedure to achieve a desired and prescribed result. Knowledge work (k-work) is decision making, the process of using one's skills and experiences to solve a problem. Information and knowledge are not always differentiated properly when organizations provide training and documentation for their workers, and information and knowledge tasks are not neatly separated in most business processes. Information and knowledge tasks can be separated and identified, allowing for the development of proper teaching and support materials.

What Is Success?

Although it is true that designers generally rely on clients, pleasing them is not the ultimate purpose of our work. What designers share with our clients is a public, an audience. Our clients wouldn't need us at all if we weren't helping them reach that public. Our broader responsibility is to the ultimate users of our work.

Sometimes You Really Can be Too Helpful

It's important to establish and maintain relationships with your audience: it gives you a handle on their changing needs so you can continue to meet those needs.

"Curb Cuts" on the Information Highway: Older Adults and the Internet

With demographic and social trends in mind, technical communicators should be examining the online communication needs of elderly people who may share certain characteristics with other Internet users, particularly the disabled community. Although education, universal design, and accessibility initiatives help us address many of the developmental and cultural barriers elderly Internet users face, this article examines some current offerings, analyzing the growing elderly audience to better incorporate usability into Web design.

What to Know About Your Audiences

If you provide your audience value in your publications equal to the effort or expense they put out, they will continue to come back. You will have created a stable system that continues to draw the audience and provide your organization with the value it deserves in return for its efforts.

Multidimensional Audience Analysis for Dynamic Information

As technical communication gains the technology to deliver dynamic custom documents, the importance of audience analysis increases. As a major factor in supporting dynamic adjustment of document content, the audience analysis must clearly capture the range of user goals and information needs in a flexible manner. Replacing a linear audience analysis model with a multidimensional model provides one method of achieving that flexibility. With a minimum of three separate dimensions to capture topic knowledge, detail required, and user cognitive ability, this model provides the writer a means of connecting content with information requirements and ensuring the dynamic document fits varying audience needs.

Ready, Aim, Write: The Value of Identifying Your Target Reader

One of the most important first steps when preparing to write a white paper is to determine who will be reading the document. This article will help you perform this critical step in the needs assessment process.

Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Market Context

Effective web design, from the simplest brochure website to the most complex web application, needs to involve an understanding of context. While user-centered design focuses on user needs/tasks, and information architecture focuses on content, these two aspects alone offer an incomplete picture. What is missing is the context: the environment in which the website or web application is used as well as the market in which it exists.

Catching the Technology Wave: A Historical Analysis of the Technological Context of Technical Communication

We seem to be constantly chasing the latest and greatest technology, eternally one step behind. Our continual struggle to establish the field of technical communication yet assert dominance over new technological domains seem to be in direct conflict with each other. How can we possibly establish our dominance over a moving target? Instead of trying to peer into future, perhaps we need to look toward the past.

Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Search Marketing Analysis from Web Stats

Last week, Jennifer covered the basics of web statistics and what they should mean for you. Now that you have a fairly good handle on what all these statistics mean, how do you put them to work for you? These concerns are answered in this article.

Tracking Your Users in the Access Logs

Most server log analysis applications on the market simply present usage information grouped by date with sub-groupings like daily averages and top downloads by file size. While this can be useful, it doesn't begin to touch the range of information available to be gleaned from the logs with a little creativity.

Changing the Way the Profession Communicates: A Workshop for Prospective Journal Peer Reviewers

More than 90% of Technical Communication readers are informed practitioners--writers, editors, illustrators, designers, trainers, and project managers. About 10% are teachers and students. They come from diverse backgrounds as well as from technical communication programs.

Prescriptive Audience Analysis: Moving Beyond the Purely Descriptive

Editing and writing both require an understanding of our audience, because without that knowledge, we can't shape our words to help them easily grasp difficult concepts. To understand our audience, we do what all writers and editors do, whether consciously or unconsciously: We create an image of our audience that guides our choice of words, images, and metaphors. This image is variously known as a 'stereotype' (e.g., Schriver 1997) or a 'persona' (e.g., Graham 2001). Keeping that image in mind as we work helps us satisfy the reader's needs, but if we're not careful, it can also cause us to waste valuable time collecting information that doesn't really help us communicate.

Task-Based Audience Segmentation

Design research is something that is widely practiced to produce anything from a better version of tax software to a new toy for kids. Its purpose is to understand customers (users) and match products to them. To date, most corporate and nonprofit research has focused either on persuading someone towards a 'purchase decision' or asking current users what they’d like added to a product.

User Research Abroad: Handle Logistics in Four Easy Steps

In our industry, we are often asked to conduct non-directed interviews by telephone with audiences around the globe. This presents several logistical challenges.

Using Audience Analysis to Make Design Decisions for Computer Documentation

Software documentation writers frequently fail to consider the broad range of their users, limiting themselves to overly simple audience breakdowns such as novice, intermediate, and expert. Before writing, technical writers should analyze their audience based on considerations such as the users’ physical environment, learning preferences, skill levels, objectives, and computer systems. Once this audience information is obtained, writers should create design models that accommodate as many of these users as possible.

A New Look at Audience Analysis

Designed to stimulate the thinking and practice of persons who already do Audience Analysis as a part of their work this hands-on Workshop will offer some new wrinkles for reimagining the audiences toward which we direct our technical communications. It proposes not a whole new scheme, but some new combination of ideas involving heuristics based on the work of Janice Lauer and Rebecca Burnett. We shall use scenarios and fact sheets, small group sessions wing differentiated tasks, and dialogues between groups to try to arrive at a fresh look at audience analysis.

Getting to Know Your Audience Through Customer Visits

Getting to know your audience is not an easy task. Telephone interviews and written surveys are helpful, but the most effective way to really understand customer needs is through face-to-face contact. A successful program of customer visits requires thoughtful planning and organization. You need to identify clear objectives, develop a discussion guide, select the appropriate customers to visit, conduct the interviews, and determine how to analyze and communicate the results. You’ll also want to develop an action plan to follow-up on what you learn. We visited 12 customers in 6 weeks. Here is our story. . .

Tactics for Building Images of Audience in Organizational Contexts: An Ethnographic Study of Technical Communicators

Discourse theories frequently emphasize the importance of understanding audience but seldom delve into how writers form conceptions of their audiences, especially in organizations. This study examines computer documentation writers' tactics for conceiving of their audiences. Based on two ethnographic case studies and insights from activity theory, the author describes and evaluates technical communicators' tactics for understanding audiences, constrained and supported by their organizations. She discusses the advantages and limitations of each tactic, looking at how each tactic might answer questions about audience. This research should be useful to technical communication educators as they expand students' options for audience research in nonacademic settings. In addition, the findings of this study can enhance theories about the ways writers create images of their audiences.

Mystery Fiction and the Technical Communicator: Audience Analysis, Foreshadowing, Research, Showing and Telling

Mystery fiction and technical writing share certain requirements: audience analysis, foreshadowing, research, showing and telling. Without audience analysis, a mystery novel may startle would-be readers of a bloodless cozy with violence suited to a hard-boiled detective story. A technical document may use a “for dummies” approach when an expert approach is appropriate. Without foreshadowing, a mystery may fail to provide characters with logical precursors to subsequent behaviors. A technical document may fail to introduce basic terms before sophisticated ones. Both types of writing benefit from accurate research and from showing and telling.

Log Analysis - A Brief Overview

Log files are text files which can range in size from 1KB to 100MB, depending on the traffic at a given a web site. Webmeisters measure traffic by the number of hits or accesses their site receives in a duration of time.

Web Statistics: The Truth is in There

In this study, we assessed and restructured Web server log statistics to analyze our customers’ use of a large-scale Internet library. We formulated questions about how these users might be accessing and navigating the information, then developed our own tools to sort and gather relevant statistics from the log files. We discuss specific successful procedures as well as limitations of the methods. Some of our findings may result in further redesign of the Web site. We also identify areas of interest for further research.

Indexing for Your Audience: Writing Indexes that Work

The frazzled reader scans your text, anxiously looking for the key word or phrase that will unravel the mystery of a less-than-helpful graphical user interface. Reaching for coffee that immediately slops onto the keyboard, the reader then resorts to desperate measures and opens your index. A quick scan of the entries confirms the reader's worst fears. The index is no help. The reader gives up, calls the Technical Support Help Desk, and relegates your carefully crafted documentation to the floor next to the recycle bin. The above scenario shows that a usable index is a key documentation component that too often receives little or no thought on the part of the writer.

Uncovering True Motivation: The Whys and Wherefore

As a designer of software systems, I believe that the child's spirit of 'why' is something to retain and infuse into our work when gathering requirements, interviewing users, and interviewing stakeholders.

Configure Web Logs in Apache

Traffic statistics have a huge impact on a Website's success, and Apache provides one of the most powerful and flexible logging features available today. Blane explains the nitty-gritty of configuring Apache Weblogs in this handy how-to.

Audience Analysis and Information Design: Creating a Needs Assessment Documentation Strategy

A user needs assessment developed from extensive audience analysis can be used to develop a documentation strategy that effectively meets user needs. This paper provides an overview of the steps required to identify and analyze the various audiences critical to enterprise software documentation and create a needsassessment- based strategy.

Making Smart Use of Web Analytics

What’s the difference between simply measuring page hits and views, and actually converting site visits to sales? Smart use of Web analytics.

Audience Analysis

A PDF document for teachers to revise and adapt for their students. The worksheet helps writers to make audience-based decisions about content, organization, formatting, style, usage, and mechanics.

Characterizing Audience for Informational Web Site Design

Presents a sample of audience analysis results and discusses how they were used to make design decisions. Reflects on the strategy, the insights gained from the data, and the impact of the results on the subject Web site.

Audience and Document Analysis

Before you begin editing a document, try to find out as much as you can about the audience for the document and purpose of the document.

Visits, Visitors, and Hits

What do people mean when they talk about 'hits,' 'visits,' and 'visitors?'

References Available Upon Request

Find out where your visitors come from.

Audience Analysis: Can You Get There From Here?

As writers we face many pitfalls. One of the most challenging is trying to meet multiple audience needs -- once we identify the audience. Rarely do we have the luxury of knowing the members of our audience personally and, even if we did, bringing them to consensus would consume all our time. As writers we often decide what the readers in our audience need before the readers have ever seen our material. The analogy of map readers can help us focus on our clients' needs.

Audience Analysis the Easy Way

Audience analysis is more often a process of guesswork than of an in-depth inquiry into the mind and activities of the user. In fact, it is pretty easy to analyze your audience without having to do any research. Essentially, there are only two things that technical writers need ask themselves during the audience-analysis phase: what does the user know about the thing I am writing about? And what does the user want to know about the thing I am writing about?

Audience Analysis: Looking Beyond the Superficial

In performing an audience analysis, it’s easy to focus on simple, obvious issues such as the differences between men and women. In fact, men and women have more similarities than differences when it comes to most of the things that technical communicators document. A discussion of some seemingly obvious differences between men and women illustrates how to look beyond superficial issues to find the truly important differences.

Knowing Your Audience

Learning experiences must be realistic ones. Hands-on practice in learning is critical. Learners need feedback to help them discover where they are in the learning process and to evaluate their progress.

The Importance of Audience

Clear writing is essential if you want your message to get across clearly to your audience. But, what makes your writing clear will vary and is ultimately dependent on your target audience. Before you write, know who you are writing for.

Cómo Leen Los Usuarios en la Web

Los usuarios en la Web no leen, o por lo menos no lo hacen de la misma forma secuencial que cuando tienen entre manos un periódico, un libro, un artículo o un cómic. Los usuarios tienen necesidades y objetivos, metas que alcanzar, y saben que la forma de conseguir dichas metas no suele ser dedicando largos ratos a cada nodo web que visitan, leyendo de principio a fin sus contenidos y enlaces. El usuario, en una página, hará clic sobre el primer enlace que crea puede llevarle a lo que busca, necesita o pudiera interesar. Eso quiere decir que muchos de los contenidos y enlaces de ese nodo ni siquiera serán vistos por el usuario.

From Formalism to Social Significance in Communication Design

At the heart of design is the goal of communication, and instilling a belief in the audience about the past, present, or future. Historically, graphic and advertising design, fields within communication design, have oriented around clients and deliverables, and have maintained a focus on translating written or spoken messages into visual communication. Designers of visual communications—graphic design and the related areas of advertising: brand and identities, Web sites, and posters and photomontages—have largely relied on the designer’s intuition and training to create appropriate visual messages.

Multimedia Theater: The Roles of Audience in Multimedia

Creating a multimedia title is much like creating a movie. The multimedia team has to work with many of the same components (sound, animation, graphics, and text) as a movie production team. Many multimedia developers see their work not as a product but as a production. Some developers no longer work in offices but in “studios,” Given this cinematic atmosphere and similarities in drama and multimedia, one can see how literary or dramatic terms can be used to describe reader (audience) roles in multimedia. In multimedia, the audience can become several different roles. This paper discusses these roles and how or if multimedia teams should react to them.

How to Know Your Audience

Lazzaro presents a method for conducting thorough user and audience analyses.

Audience Analysis of a Usenet Newsgroup

For this exercise, you will be working with and expanding on the concepts of audience discussed in the textbook by completing these preliminary tasks: · Selecting a Usenet newsgroup that discusses issues in your field · Writing and posting a relevant question to the newsgroup · Collecting responses to your question After completing these tasks, you will write a report in which you evaluate your success in adjusting your communication to your chosen audience. In the process of completing this assignment, you will gain a more sophisticated understanding of audience and get better acquainted with the kinds of interactions with professionals and students that are possible on the Internet.

The Culture of Distance Education: Implementing an Online Graduate Level Course in Audience Analysis

This essay details the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating an online course in audience analysis at the graduate level. Through a discussion of the culture of this online course, I describe how the educational culture of the Land Grant Mission flowed into our efforts to create a quality learning experience, and how the Web modules and asynchronous (listserv) and synchronous (MOO) conversations influenced communication and learning.

Organizational Size, Multiple Audiences, and Web Site Design

The designer's perspective sometimes focuses on the designer's tastes and ignores the needs and preferences of the user. Nielsen (1999) recognized the insufficiency of the designer's perspective and stressed the need to focus on usability in Web page design. The usability principle calls for the designer to prioritize the user's need over the designer's intuition and worldview. The need to bridge the gap between the designer's perspective and the user's perspective has been extensively addressed in the computer software system design literature.

Interpretation Within Audience Analysis Theories and the Crusade for True Empiricism

Audience analysis frameworks do not address an important aspect of communication in writer/audience relationships. This element is the humanistic aspect of cognitive processing, which encompasses emotional and cultural aspects. These elements exist on behalf of the writer as well as the reader, which without taking either into account lead us to a less than full understanding of how we can progress in our studies around this issue. We continue to study and theorize about how to improve interactions between writer and audience. Although current theories seem to add considerations important in the audience analysis process and the writer/audience relationship, there remains a need to find ways to address the truly empirical aspects of human interpretation.

Usability Means User-Centred Design

To create usable products you must be user-centred throughout your development process: from setting goals to installation. Two case studies illustrate why this is important. User-centred design is about actively involving users and understanding their requirements. It is necessarily iterative and multi-disciplinary. User-centred design requires commitment from your organisation or your client and yourself. Choosing your activities to match the level of acceptance of usability in your audience will help to create that commitment.

Field Trials: Trials and Tribulations of a Field Visit

I dutifully and eagerly prepared myself for the visit. I read books and STC articles on field visits and questionnaires. I was on a quest, and dangerously close to realizing a dream. At last, I would be able to define my audience, and gage the usability of the online help and hard copy manual. I would finally get the answers to my questions directly from a group of users.