Audience Analysis in Technical Writing – Audience analysis is an important and the first step of input analysis of the Document Development Life Cycle (DDLC). DDLC is a process for developing accurate and comprehensive technical documents.
Without proper understanding of the audience, a technical writer cannot tailor content to a targeted audience. It requires a more patient and strategic approach to understand the audience. Understanding is not limited to knowing their group name; you need to go deeper, and analysis their requirements, level of technical knowledge, interests, preferences, processes of adopting content, languages, and much more.
We can begin with audience analysis to categories our audience. The categorisation helps us tailor our content for a specific category of the audience. Here are four border categories of the audience:
Executive
Executive audiences are those who are involved in the decision making of the product. They are actually investors or business owners who have a vision for the product. Executives make political, legal, administrative, and business decisions based on the expert advices.
They are those who take licenses from the government and make agreements with various vendors to develop a product for the public. They ensure the legality of the product so that the product can safely reach the public without any obligation.
Experts
Experts are the people who actually define the approach and strategy of the design of the product. They know the inputs and outputs of the product because they were involved in the testing of the product. These people know what the capacity and compatibility of the product are and they also know the know issues and loopholes of the product.
They are highly educated and technical, and some of them were with the product since the inception of the product. They are masters in their technical field and know all technical terminologies and business flows of the product. However, a challenge with them is that they are unaware of how to convert the complex technologies into simple and easy manners to convey the messages effectively. Because it is a need of business, they have to convey the technical messages effectively to executions and leadership teams.
In this situation, technical writers come into the picture. Technical writers are those who have the ability to understand the technicality of the product with the right skills to convert very technical and complex information to easy and presentative information.
Junior developers
Junior developers are the people who actually worked on the group level, they actually write the code of the software product and fixed bugs. They worked under the guidance of the experts for the product development.
They are good at a specific part of the product in which they are involved but not on the whole product. These people also have a good understanding of technical concepts, business logic, and workflows of the product.
Non-specialist
Non-specialist audience holds a wider audience because they are actual users of the product. This category holds lesser knowledge of the product among other categories, and they are also non-technical. But they are interested in utilising the service of the product because the services offered by the product are solving their real-life problems.
Non-specialist audience puts effort into learning to utilize the services of the product thought various product documents. These documents include user guides, administration guides, API documents, installation guides, upgrade guides, video tutorials, and so on.
They try the best to learn and understand through different available sources, including product documents so they could perform tasks efficiently.
Designing content for a targeted audience
After identifying your audience’s category, it is important that you design content for them. Here are some important points:
Audience background
Audience background plays a crucial role while in designing content for a targeted audience. Depending on depth of knowledge, expertise, and experience on the product or technology, you should provide information and choose terminologies to explain the technical things in the technical documents.
Always remember that too little or too much information creates irrelevancy and ambiguity in the technical documents. If you give too much information for an expert audience, it will be irrelevant. The same way you give little information, it creates ambiguity for the general audience.
It is highly recommended that you write separate technical documents for different audiences. In a case, if you cannot do this due to some circumstances, then you can go with the wider audience and sacrifice the minor audience.
Additionally, you can create additional sections or pages for the minor audience and give cross-references to the main technical document.
Demographical consideration
If you are writing for a specific age, gender, disability status, education, and technical knowledge category, make your content bias-free with using the terminology that are familiar with them.
Mainly, while writing a user guide, it is highly recommended that you use the familiar terminology based on a targeted audience.
Create a persona
Creating a persona is a very useful tactic in technical writing. Especially, when you are writing technical documents for different audiences. Personas are not real people but they represent a target audience. You can create a persona based on your audience’s details like interests, age groups, locations, expertise, needs, genders, etc. While creating a persona, don’t forget to give them a name and face, it will help to write the effective technical documents for the targeted audience.
Conclusion
Audience analysis is an important step in technical writing that decides the quality of the document. Without knowing properly the targeted audience, you never write a good and comprehensive technical document. It is crucial to understand the targeted audience in depth and tailor your content as per them.
The wider audience categories explained in this article help you to easily identify the targeted audience and put them in a specific quarter. With the audience categorization, you can conduct a deep audience analysis for the targeted audience.