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.
20th 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 Aristotles 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
60s and 70s
The idea that audience somehow plays a
significant role in the design process is relatively
new to this field.
The writers 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
80s and 90s
Writers were told to learn about how readers learn,
how they do their work, and how they interacted
with texts. The writers 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 usercentered 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