Analyzing Your Audience¶
For any writing, the audience is your potential reader. The one who is going to read the document. Therefore, it is very important to meet the audience’s needs, interests, and relevance through your writing.
How can you put information that is relevant to everyone? That is just not possible!
Why? You cannot put one information that is common for everyone.
For example: If you want to write how to reach Kolkata to Pune, there are chances you will tell about the transport options availability or the best route to reach. You might skip the details of how to look up these transports or where to find them.
Let’s look at another example, In the documentation of CAD( “Computer-Aided Design”, a software to digitally create 2D drawings and 3D models of real-world products.), you will assume that the person knows how to operate the computer and how to install and configure the software. Right.. and if you try from basics, you will lose your experienced readers, who want to use the software beyond basics. The experienced reader is looking for more in-depth knowledge.
Writing would be so much easier if everyone shared the same knowledge. But that’s not the case.
That’s when Audience Analysis comes to the rescue!
Audience analysis is required in every profession, which requires content as in marketing, knowledge-sharing, and selling of the products. According to the audience, the content changes.
Why will you conduct audience analysis?
Audience analysis helps you rectify unnecessary information that you would have put otherwise. Understanding your audience helps you enough to be comprehensive yet brief. It narrows down your content to a specific audience. The information becomes more crisp, relevant, and useful.
So, how will you conduct audience analysis?
You don’t have to go and ask your user all the time what they want. (If you can do so, that would be just great!)
Let’s start by creating an audience persona. Creating an audience persona helps tailor your content to match their expectations. It will be an imaginary person whose outline you will draw after conducting the following questionnaires. The first question would be Who are your audiences going to be? To answer this question, let’s break it down further into -
- On basis of demographics
- On basis of a technicality
- On basis of knowledge and pre-requisites
On basis of demographics¶
Check the background of your users geographically. For which part of the globe you are going to write your document?
As we know, English is considered common for communication all over the world. And, we have two types: the UK and US English. A technical writer needs to be aware of the language preference of the audience. Since aside from spelling and vocabulary, there are certain grammar differences between UK and US English which technical writer needs to make note of to avoid misinterpretation.
On basis of a technicality¶
It is very necessary to understand the technical background of the user. As there are huge chances that people with different technical backgrounds cannot understand each other’s abbreviations. You need to check, what they know about the product? What type of user they are going to be? For example, a developer wants to know about the technicalities of the product, which functions or code is used for which purpose whereas the end-user simply wants to complete the task at hand. They are not interested in how the functions work.
Similarly, in the software industry, the technical writer comes across mainly three types of users. They are:
- End-User
- Admin
- Engineer
End-User¶
End-user uses the product/services. The knowledge transfer for them will be to help how to use the product, how to get started with the product. For them, you will write, end-user documentation such as user guide, help-manual, getting started guide, etc.
Admin¶
Admin who is responsible for maintaining the product/services. The knowledge transfer for them will be to help them how to rectify issues/errors and maintain the continuity of the services.
There will be two types of admin, one who is internal( in company premises, also called product admin) and the second will be external( from the customer side). The knowledge transfer document will slightly vary for both of them, which you will address in admin docs
Engineer¶
Engineer includes Infrastructure Engineer/ Cloud Engineer who is responsible for running the product/services or developers who are responsible for making of the product/services. They will be interested in how a product is built, understand the technicalities. The knowledge transfer for developers involves how to build the product in form of tutorials, reference guides, help books. The knowledge transfer for Infrastructure Engineer/ Cloud Engineer involves how to use APIs( “Application Programming Interface”, is a intermediary software that allows two applications to talk to each other ) as in API docs.
On basis of knowledge and pre-requisites¶
Here, you would want to know does your audience getting first time introduced to the product or have used the product before? How they are going to use the document? What is it they want to achieve with the document? What knowledge do they already possess? What are the pre-requisites the user needs to have? To use the product/service, what tools/system specifics they should be equipped with.
For example: Imagine you’re writing a guide to use a software product that runs under only Linux. How much can you expect your user to know about Linux? If only a few people know about Linux, should you provide that information? If you say no, you make the content incomprehensible for end-users. If you say yes, you end up frustrating the admin-user with an increased volume of documentation where his/her interest is available on the last page.
In such scenarios, follow the thumb rule of writing, As your target audience widens, assume that you must explain more with different types of documentation for different types of users.
After your audience analysis, give this persona a name, define demographics, write knowledge and prerequisites. And now write your document to help this specific persona!