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Home > Rants > Talk like a human being. > Probe your audiences--gently.> Do you know who you're talking to? |
How to get to know the individuals in your audience: Probe motivation and free will |
Do you know who you're talking to?Do you know who you are talking to?
When you ask your boss or client who actually consumes your text, you
often get a lot of waving of hands, without a few random facts, such as
But you rarely hear much about individuals. And because your job is to
develop and carry on a conversation with these people, your prose can
easily take on the all-purpose smarmy charm of an airline clerk announcing
another delay.
The more you know individuals in your audience, the better you can write
for them.
To find out about real individuals, you may be able to examine a
consumer's profile, which may be a dossier that the site should build as
the consumer navigates, ponders, buys, sends email, phones in, faxes a
question, visits a kiosk, clicks in from a handheld. Ideally, your
organization should have a single collection point for all information
about each consumer.
Unfortunately, many organizations have no idea who consumes their text.
If your site has any profiles for consumers, absorb them. But if those
profiles are skimpy, or so mired in transactional information that you
cannot envision the person behind the sales, you may need to do your own
research to find out who is really consuming your text. |
Resource Who am I writing for, and, incidentally, who am I? (Full chapter from Hot Text, in PDF, 566K, or about 10 minutes at 56k)
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Read:
Talk with anyone who has met, corresponded with, sold to, mollified, or hung up on a consumer, including:
Go out and meet the consumers, to see what they are really like. Pick a dozen consumers who matter-ones whose good will and loyalty guarantee the site's survival. Not partners. Not influential stakeholders, like investors, ad guys, designers, engineers. Real consumers of your text. Try to get to talk to them at length, in person, so you can watch their reactions, and not wear them out. But ask a lot of questions. Ask about work:
Probe motivation and free will:
(link to task analysis???) Ask about home, if appropriate:
Explore group identities and affiliations:
Obviously, you can't impose on someone for a whole day asking a thousand questions like these. But some responses are more important for you than others. Concentrate on those issues. Pay people for their time; give them cups, t-shirts, products, attention, and, yes, money. For you, their answers are gold. Online, people resent having to fill out a lengthy registration form just to visit a site or look at a particular page. If you are going to invite people to give you information to create an electronic profile, add to it incrementally.
Encourage people to look at their profiles on your site. Let them see their entire transaction history, and all the information they have provided you, over all their visits. Let them modify their profiles, too. You'll be surprised how many more fields they fill in, once they get started. Respond, too. As soon as a consumer enters an update, display it right away, not the next day. Convince your consumers you are listening.
You can see that you need a lot of time to explore all these questions with an individual. But once you have met with a dozen consumers, you'll begin to have a very deep sense of the different kinds of people you may be writing for. See: Beyer and Holtzblatt (1997), Hackos (1995), Hackos and Redish (1998), Jonassen and Hagen (1999), Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1997), Price and Korman (1993), Schriver (1997), Seybold and Marshak (1998), Seybold, Marshak, and Lewis (2001). Next: Analyze their tasks |
Who is this person? Why is he wearing a Lego truck on his hat? |
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