What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research

What is Audience? Audience refers to the real and the imagined readers (users) who use texts (products) to do something in their own environment. They are the voices in our heads guiding our decisions during the design process. When we design, we design for, imagine, and collaborate with audience to create usable products.

What is audience cont. Our relationship with our audience is constantly changing throughout the design process. 1.) Audience may be categories of users based on organizational roles or level of experience. 2.) After some field studies, our audience may be particular users we interviewed or observed. 3.) When we write, the audience is an imagined user whose voice we hear in our heads as we make design decisions.

What is audience cont. 4.) When we evaluate our designs for usability, our audience is real users who we can observe and interview. 5.) Finally, when we start a new project, our audience will include all of our previous experiences with audience – both real and imagined.

How has rhetoric treated audience? Classical Rhetoric Very important, especially to Aristotle, who identified audience as one of the three elements that created the speech (speaker, subject, and audience). Roman rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian examined how different audiences required different stylistic approaches.

Cont. New Rhetoric Audience became de-emphasized as considerations of style and arrangement became more important. According to new rhetoric, if writers followed the proper form to express an existing truth, then audiences were expected to respond favorably. 20 th century-handbooks to help writers ensure their style and usage was formally correct.

Cont. Expressivist Rhetoric In response to the restrictive, rules-based approach of New Rhetoric, the most important audience for the writer was the self. Expressivist rhetoric holds that writing is an art, a means of self-discovery and expression

Cont. Neo-Classical Rhetoric Responding to the expressivists, rhetoricians such as I.A. Richards and Wayne Booth returned to the classical roots of Aristotle’s rhetoric where audience (and the rhetorical situation) played an important role in the creation of effective texts. It emphasized the reader as authority (rather than the writer) and explored the ethical responsibilities of writers to do more than force a message on their readers.

How has technical communication treated audience? Audience is central to effective design 60’s and 70’s The idea that audience somehow plays a significant role in the design process is relatively new to this field. The writer’s job was to adapt the text to the audience: job function, type and level of reader, level of experience, and culture.

Cont. Audience is central to effective design 80’s and 90’s Writers were told to learn about how readers learn, how they do their work, and how they interacted with texts. The writer’s job was to design a text that met the functional needs of the audience.

How has technical communication treated audience? When we speak of audience, we must consider all of these approaches. Technical communicators often move back and forth through these various approaches to audience.

What is the value of information about audience? Learning to be more user-centered Through analyzing information about audience, we can gain valuable insights into their problems, preferences, and situations that can later influence our design decisions. Only through observations of users, feedback from users, and knowledge of users’ situations can these other professions move towards user- centered design.

What is the value of information about audience? Improving design By building our experience through observations of user behavior, even users in other domains, we can become better designers. Building Theories of Audience Technical communicators need access to usability information to build and test their own theories of audience.

Conclusion In sum, audience means: Intended users for whom we are designing our products Real users of our products who actually end up using them Real users we observe in their environments trying to get their jobs done using our products Voices of imagined users (perhaps based on experiences with real users) inside our heads guiding our design decisions Ourselves, especially when we have no concept of the real user Implied users, or representations of our mental models of our users embodied in our products