Audience Analysis in Technical Documentation

All of us do it every day and every moment. We try to guess what is in the mind of the person we are speaking to. Even before we speak, sub-consciously doubt if the listener knows what we are speaking. We like to give him the right information. Advertising agencies spend millions of bucks to research the consumer behavior and understand the mindset of the audience. They initially try to attract attention and then attempt to win the customer’s hearts in various ways. Filmmakers try to gaze the taste of the audience and make films that set the audience on their nerves. Obviously, whatever you do, wherever you go, the customer is the Queen. In marketing parlance, the customer is referred to as the Queen because it is easier to appease the Gods and the King. Truly speaking, audience analysis in technical documentation is a lot easier than the other fields.

Purposeful approach
We make documents to serve a purpose. It is the purpose that defines what document we need to make for the audience. If the user is new to the product and knows nothing, we need to make a step-to-step user guide. For sophisticated users, a briefing about the product and the options available would be enough. This makes it clear that the purpose and the knowledge level of the audience together form the primary part of audience analysis. Knowledge level can be guessed by asking questions such as:

What does the user know and what is it that the document should impart?
What level of detail is required for the user to neither get confused nor irked by including basic information?

Knowledge Level
It is difficult to know what the users know. There is always a difference in knowledge levels even between two students who graduated from the same school. In order to pacify both experts and novices, we can follow the safer approach. Assume that the user does not anything about this particular product but knows about everything else under the sky. Under such circumstances, we can elaborate upon our product to make the job easier for the user.

Relevance matters
We need to include all the relevant information about the product from installing the product, configuring it, using it, maintaining it to troubleshooting it in times of necessity. The functionality of the product should be detailed in tune with the knowledge levels of the user as assumed. It is not advisable to include any information outside the arena such as information about the industry.

With an air of authority, the technical document should complete all the areas about the document and must be sans voids. Any user is comfortable to refer to the document that covers everything about a product in spite of his knowledge about the product. Being nonchalant to the expert will often prove to be risky. Hence tell everything about the product gives them a choice to ignore parts of the document that they already know.