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

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

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

Page 1: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

What is the value of audience to technical communicators?

A Survey of Audience Research

Page 2: 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.

Page 3: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

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.

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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.

Page 5: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

How has rhetoric treated audience?

• Classical RhetoricVery 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.

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Cont.

• New RhetoricAudience 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.

20th century-handbooks to help writers ensure their style and usage was formally correct.

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Cont.

• Expressivist RhetoricIn 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

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Cont.

• Neo-Classical RhetoricResponding 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.

Page 9: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

How has technical communication treated audience?

• Audience is central to effective design60’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.

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Cont.

• Audience is central to effective design

80’s and 90’sWriters 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.

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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.

Page 12: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

What is the value of information about audience?

• Learning to be more user-centeredThrough 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.

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What is the value of information about audience?

• Improving designBy 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.

Page 14: What is the value of audience to technical communicators? A Survey of Audience Research.

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