More about Audience Analysis?

I've found a lot of useful blogs on what constitutes audience analysis and the whys and hows of audience analysis. So, I choose not to repeat these points as they have been well explained. What I will do instead is look at it from a bigger perspective and drill down to how it relates to the rest of the process of developing a course.

At a high level, audience analysis needs to be done for any product or service that you create or provide. Let's say you make a product. In order for the product to be successful, you would have to:

• Ensure that the product is simple and easy to use, like limits the user to have to fill just one page with customer information and submit, and the system takes care of the rest.
• Simplifies and accurately addresses a problem that a user has, like helps a user to effectively take and manage orders.

The question is, how would you do any of the above? The answer; by knowing the user who is your audience!

Reinforcing why audience analysis?
Any requirement for either training, documentation or even the creation of a product is driven by audiences. If audiences demand something, only then do you plan to initiate the creation of a product or plan to provide a service. That is why these days we make customer-centric processes, user-centric user interfaces and learner-centric courses. It is simple logic actually; if one cannot use your product, it wont sell; if you don't provide requisite training and documentation, people won't be able to use the product properly, and hence won't buy it; if your product is functionality heavy and has fantastic features, but the interface is too complex, again people won't buy it! Like it or not, users drive needs; so you need to know your audience and perform audience analysis.

Knowing your audience?
Knowing your audience means you should know who the prospective users of your product or service are and what tasks they typically perform. I am developing a social networking tool for people in general, or, I'm designing a social networking tool to help connect professionals within my organization. In each case, the choice of the features I provide would be customized to each kind of audience. In the former case, I may provide a lot of personal information sharing options like, photos, blogs, game applications, etc. In the latter case, I may not provide photo sharing, but idea and knowledge sharing within the organization, professional groups, providing recommendations/appreciation for work done, etc. Though the overall concept of connecting with people would be the same, there would be specific customizations that would address personal or professional requirements in each case. To summarize you need to know:

• Who is the audience?
• What tasks they perform as part of their job?

What skills do they need to posses? Prior Knowledge?
If an individual has to use your product, what are the basic skills they need to posses? In our example, they may need to be familiar with browsing and using internet applications on a given platform like Windows, Mac, etc.

• What skills the audience needs to posses?
• Their prior knowledge of using similar tools?

Audience demographics?
It is important to know the age group and background of the audience; is your audience an adult, a teenager or a child? Knowing the target age group that your audience falls into, is an important piece of information that drives many requirements like, your user interface, the contents of your product/tool, or even the level complexity.

Working conditions?
Working conditions that the audience is subject to like if he works in shifts or the hardware and software the audience typically uses. If your audience is a system administrator, he would typically work in shifts and have access to the servers in the organization, etc. This information helps you know what your assumptions could be; like a system administrator would know the basics of installing and configuring servers, and also be familiar with concepts related to servers like clustering, etc.

Target devices used?
The devices from which your product, service, course or documentation be accessed like computers, handhelds, etc. This helps you plan your delivery mode and technology to use to develop your product or service.

Audience Level?
Additionally, it helps to know if your audience is a beginner or an expert in using similar products or services.

Developing your course?
Coming back to developing a course, it is only after you collect and analyze the information that you can come to your list of tasks.

Here's a sample template you can use.

So, you can now make a list of the tasks that you need to teach:
- Installing and configuring the ABC product.
- Authenticating and authorizing users using ABC product.
- Managing user credentials.
- Controlling access to devices and hardware.

There's your task list and now and you can now begin your task analysis. That's another topic I will cover. Till then please let me know your comments on this post.