IT 226 Defining Audiences and Creating Personas

Whether you’re designing a Web site or a medical device—or something somewhere in between—your audience is comprised of the people who will benefit from that design. And the totality of your audience’s

experience is profoundly impacted by what you know—or don’t know—about them. —S. M. Weinschenk, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

Everything you write is targeted for a specific audience. Often we analyze audiences and adjust for their preferences in our everyday communications without even realizing it. Consider a text message you sent to a friend recently—would the same language, tone, and structure also work in an email to your instructor? Likely not. The big question is: Why not?

Your friend and your instructor are members of different audiences. Before you write a message to each, you consider what you know about them and then shape your communication to meet their preferences and the purpose of the communication. As you move in to writing as a STEM professional, you will need to define audiences in order to create effective written pieces for:

● Internal audiences (e.g., coworkers, leadership) ● External audiences (e.g., clients, customers, users)

Why We Define Audiences

By defining audiences, we are increasing the likelihood that our message will be received by the audience and that the audience will perform the desired action. Here is an example:

Fernando is a data analyst for a marketing firm. Each week, Fernando creates a report and emails it to all directors and supervisors so everyone can see the data. During a meeting, a director, who receives the emailed report every week, asked for some statistics to be emailed to him monthly. When Fernando’s supervisor noted that the statistics were in the weekly report, the director responded that he never reads that report and that he would rather not have to sift through information that he did not need to get the statistics.

In Fernando’s situation, while the needed information was being sent to the correct person, the information was not being received because the director was not taking the desired action. When defining audiences, it’s a common first instinct to want to include as many people as possible in the audience. While trying to make your audience as inclusive as possible sounds like the best method, this can lead to vague and ineffective communications just like in Fernando’s situation. In short:

Trying to target everyone means you likely won’t reach anyone.

Creating a message for a very broad or undefined audience will cause issues as you try to pinpoint the exact tools, methods, and language you need to use to effectively reach the audience. With a large, vague audience, you may even find that members of this audience require conflicting decisions. A marketing director doesn’t have the same perspectives, experiences, or motivations as a software development director. A marketing director is more likely to want to see sales numbers for an application, while the software development director is more likely to want to know if the application is functioning properly. If you try to make both of these people happy with a single communication,

achieving success will be very difficult, and sometimes close to impossible. Defining audiences for communications, and then developing the communications to meet their specific needs, helps us improve the likelihood that our audiences will receive our communications and take any desired actions.

How We Define Audiences

Now that we know why, the question then becomes where do you start defining audience? Unfortunately, the answer to that question can be different based on the purpose of the communication. A new startup focusing on guided nature tours may need to start at the beginning by researching many different groups to determine who would and would not be interested in that experience. A Fortune 500 health insurance company would likely have tons of previous audience research to examine and may already have paid specifically for research to identify who is aware of and/or uses their services. Regardless of the foundation you have to start from, there are some standard questions to answer as you begin to define your audience:

1. Age: Use exact numbers to show the age range of your audience (e.g., 18–25)—stay away from vague descriptions like “children” or “seniors.” Think about how the lowest and highest ends of your range relate to each other (e.g., ask yourself what a 13 year old and 70 year old have in common for a 13–70 range). If they’re too different, you should consider shortening your range.

2. Location: Don’t assume that your audience is automatically all in the United States. Think about your organization—does it work with or otherwise engage people from outside the United States? Start with defining the country for your audience and then break it down to the state, province, county, city, or neighborhood level as appropriate. For internal communications, this could be as specific as “the Human Resources department.”

3. Income: Identify if someone’s income is a factor for your audience. If you are developing a free smartphone application, income may not be a factor. If you are creating software for a necessary service, like banking, income may be a moderate factor. If you are developing software for a luxury item, such as a “smart thermostat,” income may be a huge determining factor.

4. Education Level: A person creating a game that teaches the English alphabet could reasonably assume that their audience will be in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. Some may be younger or older, but a majority would be at this level in their education. A website that provides a searchable database for tax law documentation would likely be targeted to lawyers, all of whom have post- baccalaureate degrees. For internal communications, consider if there is a disparity in education levels—look at the position requirements for the group you are targeting within the organization.

5. Religion and/or Culture: A church could be seeking new members of their same denomination or they might be looking to attract people of other faiths in an effort to start an inter-faith group. For each, understanding the religion of your audience is key to the messaging you will create. In many situations, religion will not play an important role for the audience. Since many products and services have global reach, it is likely that you will need to also consider non-U.S. cultural expectations such as food, dress, and/or taboos.

How to Understand Audiences: Creating Personas

Sometimes the idea of defining an audience can feel daunting. Sometimes staying focused on your audience is tricky while moving through the process of developing your product or service. Creating personas can help alleviate both of these issues, as personas are a tool used in a variety of disciplines to understand and stay focused on an audience. Creating personas is similar to writing a character for a fiction novel: while the person is not real, you’ll still need to think about how someone with the traits you select would function in their daily lives.

The following are the steps to building a persona. In the below example, assume that the project the persona is for is a software program that allows users to manage consolidated, on-the-go business scheduling.

Creating a Persona

1. Think about all of the different types of people, or audiences, who could use your product or service. Write these audiences down; decide on one of them to focus on for your persona.

 For our example, we can consider entrepreneurs, administrative assistants, and executives since all of these people are likely to use the product. We can then select “entrepreneurs” as the audience to focus on for this persona.

Tip: If you run into difficulty thinking about your audience, you can try modeling your persona after a friend or family member who would reasonably be interested in using the product or service for their personal life or work.

2. Look at stock images to find a picture of a person—you can select any image for any reason.

 For the example, we will use this image:

3. Name your person.

 For the example, we will name the person in our picture “Carrie.”

4. Attach identifiers to this person; start by working through the five categories listed in the How We Define Audiences section.

 For the example, we know that Carrie is an entrepreneur. We decide to make Carrie 58 years old so we can consider audiences over the age of 40. Carrie will be based somewhere in the United States but, since the application is accessible anywhere, the location within the United States is not important. The application costs $5 a month so we decide that income is also not a limiting factor. We’ve decided to focus on an educated but non-technical audience, so we give Carrie a bachelor’s degree in a field unrelated to computer science. Religion and culture are not factors for this persona.

5. Use the identifiers to build the story of what your person’s life is like—be creative!

6. Format the information you have so far into a complete persona document.

 The options for formatting a persona are endless—there’s no right or wrong way to organize a persona as long as it is easy to read and understand. Here is an example of how we can format the persona for Carrie:

7. Continue to consider the person in your persona and perform research to add additional demographic or psychographic details to form a complete picture of who this audience is.

Creating Additional Personas

Once you have completed the first persona, a second persona can quickly be created by selecting the opposites of all of the identifiers used in the first persona.

Carrie Darren

Business owner Employee

Age: 58 Age: 19

Interior designer Intern

BFA in Graphic Design Some work completed toward an AA degree

Comfortable with technology Uncomfortable with technology

The we can use the identifiers to build Darren’s story:

Darren is 19 years old and in his first year of studies at a local college, working toward an AA degree. As part of a program through his college, Darren was matched with an internship at a company that manufactures emergency vehicles (such as ambulances). For the internship, Darren will be the assistant to the plant manager and will perform tasks like scheduling, filing, answering the telephone, and writing business communications.

Darren did not have a computer in his house growing up and got his first cell phone, a “flip phone,” at age 16. He just upgraded that phone to an iPhone but it is three years old. He does not really understand much about how the iPhone works and currently only uses it to make phone calls and send text messages. While he is eager to learn, Darren tends to get overwhelmed easily.