[Sigia-l] Personas vs. Audience Analysis

[Thomas Quine]

The problem I see with personas has been mentioned already - that the
focus is on who the user is rather than what they do. This has limited
value for usability analysis, because after all, usability is all about
doing.

I approach all information design projects the same way, whether it's a
website or a training course or a manual or an illustration. I focus on
what the target audience wants to do, not who they are.

I start with task analysis to identify the "do" stuff. We prepare legal
information, so for instance, one of the things we've learned from the
questions we get asked is that some people want to obtain legal
visitation rights to their grandchildren.

Who wants to do this? Ask a few questions, and you learn it's mostly
grandmothers, rather than grandfathers, and you can segment the
grandmothers into different categories - for instance, rural vs. urban.
So one segment of our audience is elderly rural women (no kidding, this
is one of my target audiences).

How can we help our audience do what it is they want to do? Now I do
audience analysis, which consists of finding the answers to two
questions:

1. What is it about my audience that might play a factor in their
ability to do what it is they want to do?
2. What is it about my audience that might play a factor in my choice of
information product?

To the first question, you get answers like: Many are not terribly
well-educated and mostly they have little legal knowledge. Many have
below-average incomes, can't afford lawyers, and feel intimidated by the
legal system. They are strongly motivated. And so on.

To the second question, you get answers like: This audience has limited
access to high bandwidth and few have a computer in the home. They
mostly speak English. They're not terribly Web-savvy and they may be
near-sighted. They prefer to talk to people in person, etc. They mostly
have telephone access but limited ability to travel, etc.

Funny thing I've learned is that when you start focusing on what people
want to do, almost immediately your audience sorts itself into
functional groups for whom it's easy to identify a suitable information
product. Then the persona fairly jumps out at you.

- Thom