Audience Analysis

Reference

We design our projects/documents for users/readers. It is important to understand who they are, and why they might be using our project/document.

1. Who are the readers/users

   You want as thorough a characterization as possible.

   What language do they expect to see the page in?

   How old are they?

   Are they students?

   Are they employed?

   If employed, what do they do?

   What do they actually do day by day on the job?

   What is their educational background?

   You should spend some time with them if possible to really get to know them.

   You should have them fill out a questionnaire, as a web form. Of course, you'll have to make it available to the possible users of your project. So start identifying them now. You'll want the form to email information to you, Lab 3 will teach this material, and part of the assignment is to send out and receive back and analyze such a form. Please avoid using members of this class unless they are absolutely the best audience.

2. What do they already know?

   People often know something about the subject of your document.

   You should determine what they know and to what depth they know it.

   This will enable you to create the site to their level.

3. How is your audience going to use the information?

   Research shows that people use information in at least 4 ways.

   1. Doing:

      This is doing/reading to perform a task.

      An example is the set of instructions (documentation) for assembling something or a search tool that allows people to find things.

   2. Learning:

      Textbooks and courses are written for this

      They often proceed from general ideas to specific details.

   3. Assessing and Analyzing:

      This is often just scanning to get an idea of the document's contents or a tool's use (as in our bulletin board)

      Pictures are particularly useful here.

   4. Learning to do:

      This is doing/reading to learn how to perform a task.

      You might be reading this document to learn how to do an audience analysis. You might do the audience analysis to decide what to do in your project.

4. What questions do users ask? Be sure to give a place in your form to gather such infomation.

   Observing what questions readers/users ask often can help make a document better.

   It is somewhat paradoxical that the more writers know about a subject, the harder it is to anticipate (and hence write to) users questions.

Questionnaires, interviews with readers/users, interviews with people familiar with readers, feedback from previous versions all help to perform an audience analysis.