Audience analysis

Audience analysis is a task that is often performed by technical writers in a project's early stages. It consists of assessing the audience to make sure the information provided to them is at the appropriate level. The audience is often referred to as the end-user, and all communications need to be targeted towards the defined audience. Defining an audience requires the consideration of many factors, such as age, culture and knowledge of the subject. After considering all the known factors, a profile of the intended audience can be created, allowing writers to write in a manner that is understood by the intended audience.

Audience analysis involves gathering and interpreting information about the recipients of oral, written, or visual communication.

There are numerous methods that a technical communicator can use to conduct the analysis. Because the task of completing an audience analysis can be overwhelming, using a multi-pronged approach to conduct the analysis is recommended by most professors, often yielding improved accuracy and efficiency. Michael Albers suggests that an analysis use several independent dimensions that work together, such as reader knowledge of the topic and reader cognitive ability.

Writers can also use conversation, in-depth interviews or focus groups to help them to complete an audience analysis. Conversation as well as other qualitative research techniques will allow the communicator to consider the multiple cultural, disciplinary, and institutional contexts of their target audience, producing a valuable audience analysis.

David L. Carson of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute asserted that technical communicators most often perform their jobs with little or no knowledge about their audience. Carson states that the analysis should include a reader's level of comprehension of the technical vocabulary and motivation, as well as reading level. Indicators of a reader's high level of motivation include high interest in the subject matter, relatively high knowledge of the content, and high personal stakes in mastering the information.

Another technique used to conduct an audience analysis is the "bottom-up" approach. Leon de Stadler and Sarah van der Land explore this type of approach in reference to a document produced by an organization that develops different kinds of interventions in the field of HIV/AIDS education. This particular document focused on the use of contraception and targeted the black youth of South Africa. The initial document was created by document designers in the United States who did not base their design on an extensive audience analysis. As a result, the document, which used the informal slang of black South African youth, did not effectively communicate with its target audience. After the dissemination of the document, Van der Land used focus groups and interviews of a sample of the target audience to discover what improvements should be made. Upon considering the audience's perspective, she found that the initial document's use of the hip-style language backfired. The interviewees indicated that the use of the popular language was not effective because it was not used correctly or consistently throughout the document. Additionally, to the target audience, the informal language did not fit the seriousness of the topic being discussed. The suggested "bottom-up" approach should have incorporated the target audience during the design process instead of as an afterthought.

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