1.2 Audience and Persona

Since audience awareness is the single most important aspect of technical communication, this section defines the different types of audience and explains how to create a persona.

How do you identify your audience?

Your audience is the people who will read and use your document. However, there are different types of audiences. According to Johnson-Sheehan (2015):

• Primary audience: They are the actual users of your document, and you write directly to them since they will take action based on the content you provide.
• Secondary audience: They have a relationship with the primary audience, and they provide advice or feedback to the primary audience.
• Tertiary audience: They are outside of your company.  They are not an intended audience, but they may get your document. Think about competing companies or even the media.
• Gatekeepers: They are people who have a relationship with you from within the company who will or may see your document before you send or publish it, such as lawyers, administrators, or even colleagues who give you feedback.

Additionally, these audiences can be broken down by skill level:

• Beginners: This audience does not have any background knowledge of the software and requires extensive, simplistic definitions, and steps.
• Intermediate: This audience may understand technical terms but would benefit from a glossary and in-depth explanations about why steps are necessary.
• Advanced: This audience has a high level of software level knowledge and needs advanced content beyond steps such as a detailed troubleshooting guide.
• Expert: This audience is extremely skilled, understands the jargon, has used the product for many years but may not know the new updates or creative ways of using the platform (Harsh, 2024).

When you do research about your audience, you will always focus on the primary audience, or end users.  You need to consider what they need, want, and value, and be mindful of how they will use your document.

Audiences typically hunt for the information they need in your text, so it is up to you as the technical writer to write and design in a manner than allows them to find that information easily. In this way, you must consider your audience before you make any content, word choice, organizational, or design choices.

In Industry

You determine your audience through careful analysis of user data analytics, focus groups, social media, and other avenues through both primary and second research methods. In fact, in addition to doing extensive research to identify who their audience is, technical writers also talk to those people to understand what they need, what they already know, and HOW they use the software to perform the required tasks of their job.

Since as a technical writer you are focused on making documentation as clear and relevant as possible, you must understand how the software is used in the performance of specific job duties which is the only way you can write and design documentation appropriately.

For a more in-depth discussion of how technical writers gather user data, please read the “What is User Interaction and Usability Testing?” section of this tutorial.

In School

For your own tutorial, however, you will choose a specific audience and craft a persona based on who you think would need your tutorial to complete their job duties or schoolwork. This course is not designed to help you learn how to do real world audience analysis, or design a primary research methodology, but you will have the tools to understand what kind of information you need to know about your audience, and you will create a fictional audience along with a more concrete persona to whom you will write.

Since you are writing about software, you need to have a higher knowledge level than your audience, so if you feel you have an intermediate knowledge of the platform, it is a good idea to choose a beginning audience for your document. If you are an expert, then you can write to an advanced or intermediate audience.

Additionally, you need to think about their education level, work experience, age, values, goals, and other relevant information, such as country of origin since culture could also be a consideration.  You also need to consider their job duties and how the software fits in with their job responsibilities.

Understanding your audience deeply can help you decide what content needs to be included in the tutorial, including instructions on how to download and install the software, and how the document should be designed and organized. The design of the document needs to complement the content, not detract from it, and should align with the software branding, if you are writing as an agent of the company that produces the software, as well as your audience’s aesthetic.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional character that you create based on your research of the whole audience. Since this is an industry standard practice, you will create a persona based on your assumptions of an audience. Rather than approaching your audience as some vague entity, you should create a persona which is a specific “person” who represents your audience.

Even the Society of Technical Communication provides important information about Persona. Make sure you click the example personas at the bottom before you create your own, so you get a good idea of what should be included. Industry technical writers create personas to help them focus their content, organize properly, and design appropriately. Even professionals in human-centered design use personas to help them ensure the usability in design.  This Personas – A Simple Introduction provides a breakdown of different personas as well as how to create them.

For example, if you have determined through your research that your audience is educated adults who are middle age but not technologically savvy and need to learn your software for their job in Human Resources, you could create a persona of a woman who is late 50s, has a Master’s degree in Human Resources, and needs to learn how to use GitHub version control software, which is your tutorial topic.  You could state that her name is Diana, and you could go so far as to use Open Art AI to create a picture of your persona.  Figure 1.2.1 is a picture of Diana which was created by Open AI after crafting specific demographic of this audience (woman, middle age, educated, professional, mixed race):