Audience Analysis
Before writing any document,
you need to know who you are writing it for.
Your readers may be experts in the field or they may be complete novices; without proper audience analysis, documents risk being unclear, misinterpreted or ineffective.
Audience analysis should include the following information about the users:
- Job role
- Experience level
- Usage context
- Learning style and preferred level of detail
- Tasks they want to accomplish
- Challenges they face
Based on the user information collected as explained in Audience Analysis, you can segment your audience into groups and create user personas - fictional representations of typical users, based on real data and common characteristics.
The personas can then inform your documentation strategy - for example, you may need a very user-friendly getting started section for novice users coupled with a detailed API reference for developers who will implement an integration.
For more details about creating personas for documentation, see this article on UXmatters.
Even if you don't create written, detailed personas, it is still useful to have a few basic types of audience in mind when creating the documentation.
For example, a simple split could be between functional documentation (aimed at the end-users of an application) and technical documentation (aimed at the IT technicians supporting the end-users).
To understand what your audience needs, you can collect information directly or indirectly:
- Direct user interaction - Directly ask users about their background, preferences, knowledge levels, and expectations.
- User feedback - Analyze bug reports and use feedback tools and analytics to track user reactions and assess content effectiveness.
- Collaboration with subject matter experts - Gain knowledge from product managers or customer success representatives who have constant interaction with the end-users.
The best way to get information about user preferences is to ask them directly, either in writing or in person. An in-person or Zoom interview gives better opportunities for asking follow-up questions, but it's also more time-consuming for both the interviewer and the interviewee, so a good balance is essential. To optimize resources, you can send a survey to your entire user base, then select a representative sample to talk to directly.
The following table offers some suggestions for questions you can ask in a survey.
The following table offers some suggestions for questions you can ask in a survey.
Category | Questions |
|---|---|
General User Information |
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Usefulness & Effectiveness |
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Findability |
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Accessibility & Readability |
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Generally speaking, usability testing for documentation implies asking users to accomplish a task with the help of documentation.
You can use a more general approach by asking people to use the documentation as they normally would or you can run a more detailed test by having them focus only on the table of contents or the search function.
By observing users interacting directly with the documentation, you can:
- Evaluate the clarity of the content
- Identify usability issues
- Understand how users search for information
- Assess readability
For more information about usability testing, see this article on the Nielsen Norman website.
User feedback can highlight documentation gaps and usability issues and can help drive prioritization. You can gather feedback either directly, by embedding feedback mechanisms on the documentation pages, or indirectly, by analyzing support cases and analytics.
Feedback tools in documentation can range from the simple to the complex:
- A mailto: link that sends an email to the documentation team
- Thumbs up/down or star ratings that indicate if an article was useful or not
- Feedback forms that encourage users to leave written feedback
The usefulness of such features is directly tied to the management strategy behind them. Best practices include:
- Assign responsibility for reviewing the data and tracking patterns.
- Store the feedback in a database (even something simple, like an Excel file).
- Filter out non-documentation-related reports.
- Use structured feedback forms to capture specific issues rather than vague reactions.
- Implement a strategy for communicating the results of the feedback back to the end-users.
Documentation teams often jump to implementing feedback mechanisms with unrealistic expectations.
The reality is that the vast majority of feedback will be either too vague or not really about the documentation.
Make sure to weigh the pros and cons; if the cost of implementing and managing the feedback form is too large, maybe it's better to use other ways of hearing from your users.
If a company has a customer support or customer success team, there is probably a lot of data available that can be used in audience analysis.
Support inquiries can help technical writers to:
Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can be easily implemented in online documentation systems.
Once you have enough data, you can:
- Analyze page views to see which sections of the documentation are most accessed. You can then prioritize these pages when it comes to improvement initiatives.
- Track time spent on a page to understand how users engage with the content, highlighting areas that might be confusing or require more in-depth explanations.
- Monitor user search queries to see when they don't find the information they need, which can help you make a list of topics that need to be added.
- Review drop-off points to analyze where users leave the documentation, suggesting areas where the content or navigation might need simplification or clearer instructions.
Subject matter experts, especially ones who have direct client interaction such as product managers, can serve as a good source of guidance for documentation.
Customer-facing SMEs can help in audience analysis by:
- Clarifying user roles, needs and skill levels
- Helping writers understanding real-world use cases
Once you have decided on your user personas, analyzed their requirements and got feedback from the users, you are ready to move on to the next step:
