It’s All About the Audience

Tags

audience, characteristics, people, personas, user groups

People, People, People

In Janice Redish’s Letting Go of the Words, she emphases how our audience members and understanding them is the most important aspect when creating a website that will benefit the creator in the long run. To be a successful writer, you will consider your audience and focus on what’s best for them. There are seven steps to better understand who your audience is, and Redish describes them as thus:

List your major audiences

Gather information about your audiences

List major characteristic for each audience

Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks, and stories

Use your information to create personas

Include the persona’s goals and tasks

Use your information to write scenarios for your site

When listing your user groups, you always need to be sure you are referring to actual people. This way it is as specific as possible when reaching out to your user group.

Once you begin to gather information about your audiences, you are able to get to know them better and their “realities”. It’s best to gather this information through surveys, interviews, feedback, as well as ethnographies. This way you can then list the different characteristics for the audiences. As someone gathering information, you may come across different emotions of the audience members. This is good to use within the characteristic step.

It is a good idea to gather different questions that your user group will want answered on your website. After doing so, you can use all of this information that you have gathered to create personas of the website, include the personal goals, as well as be able to write different scenarios for the website. This is important because then the website can be of live use and personal feel for your user groups. When creating these scenarios, it is important to remember that they will be able to help you produce a well thought out website.

Your Thoughts

What would be one thing you would like to add onto a website of your own? Do you think it is important for a website to be specifically directed at one user group?