Making Sense Out of What You Learn about Your Audiences - Page 5

Psychology at your service:
How many ways can you slice a personality?

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul! — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

You'd think that by now humans could have come up with a single theory of personality. But no. Just in the realm of therapy there are dozens of theories taking off from Freud and Jung, and spreading like jungle grass. If one of these therapeutic approaches makes sense to you, go ahead and use it to interpret the information you have just gleaned from the actual consumer.

Ditto for religion. If a particular religion gives the world meaning for you, then by all means use its theory of personality to interpret the consumer and your relationship to that person. If you follow a spiritual practice, observing the movement of your inner life, use your guru's ideas to understand yourself in relation to the other. If you're a novelist, write a narrative. Stories are an excellent way to envision a character in action. Or create a drama, a video, or a song.

Whatever profession you come from or live among, it probably offers you its own dominant psychology, its own way of interpreting human behavior, refined and disputed by various splinter groups, crusading sects, and reformers. For instance, economists, who for years believed that all economic behavior was reasonable, are now beginning to recognize a new type of person: the irrational consumer. Similarly, cognitive science which has focused for years on thought problems that can be simulated on the computer, has edged into fuzzy logic and a deeper sense of human unpredictability.

Even the discipline that fostered writing, rhetoric, has its war of psychologies between the post modernists, the traditional Aristotelians, the sophists, the discourse community folks, and worse.

Bottom line: There are hundreds of psychologies out there, and you should adopt whichever one you feel familiar with, because the point is for you to make sense out of your users and readers internally. If a particular approach seems cold, unfeeling, or unfamiliar, skip it, because it will not help you to conceive of your audience in realistic human terms.

But adopt some method. You need a theoretical framework in which to organize and preserve what you have observed. If no psychology appeals to you, consider task analysis, use cases, or niche analysis—a set of interlocking tools that come from usability study, object-oriented programming, and, yes, marketing.

Analyzing the tasks

Somehow, through direct interviews, studying the research, or asking questions on your site, you have gathered a lot of information about exactly what your consumers do and why. If you want to produce text that helps people achieve their goals, try thinking through the tasks each consumer performs over and over.

A task is an action someone performs to reach a goal. The name of the task is whatever the consumer says it is—not what your team likes to call it.

Each person starts with a goal, such as finishing the budget, getting a raise, learning a new skill, getting in touch with other people, or just being amused. Sometimes this goal aligns with what the boss wants, but usually the organization's goals, such as increasing profit margins, reducing time to market, or cutting five people from the support team, just makes the person's life diffcult. Pretending to do what the boss wants, while getting some personal amusement, can be a challenge.

As a writer you must care more about your consumers than about their corporations, universities, agencies, labs, or non- governmental bodies. Corporations don't read. Try to identify the goals in the way your consumers really talk about them because the terms they use to describe their goals reflect their values, passions, and life experience.

Goals are as multifarious as people. For instance, here are some of the different goals people may come to your site with:

• To have fun葉o be entertained, pulled out of one's self, aroused, fulfilled, stirred up and satisfied, to participate in a game, to play.
• To learn葉o pick up facts, to see patterns, to recognize sequences, groups, hierarchies, and themes, to learn to solve problems, to talk in a new language.
• To act葉o make a purchase, to register, to acquire, download, send or receive information, software, music, videos, or whatever.
• To be aware葉o sense what is going on internally and in others, to grow, to become, or just to be.
• To get close to people葉o share, to show o､, to feel intimate with total strangers through virtual conversations, postings, flames, posturing and revealing.

There are many selves in a character, and their relation to each other is the matter that is often most obscure. What complicates the search, then, is not the simple fact that identity inheres in action and must be sought there, but rather than the action is not single in its purpose. Once again we are looking for a cast, for a script, and for an explication du texte. — Jerome Bruner, "Identity and the Modern Novel," in On Knowing

Generally people formulate a goal rather vaguely and then form a specific intention, which demands a certain course of action. When they carry out that activity, they pause and look around them, to see what has changed. They interpret the state of the world, to evaluate the outcome. Carrying out a task involves the entire cycle, starting with the aim and moving through the activity to a decision about whether or not the actions have led to success.

You may want to analyze important tasks by walking the person through this cycle. Or you might settle just for noting the concrete actions taken to achieve the goal. (These actions may end up as individual steps in your instructions, if you need to tell people how to do the task.)

Start by listing all the tasks that flow from a particular goal in no particular order. Then organize them into chronological order as best you can. (Some tasks always happen at the start, others at the end, and the rest could happen, well, at any time). For the tasks that could happen anytime, try to discern a reasonable grouping by action or object worked on. You want to make some kind of meaningful order out of the collection of tasks because this inventory may form the basis for a menu system and an organization of your instructions, procedures, or FAQs.

You may find that some tasks are very large scale, such as shopping or getting a raise. Other tasks are intermediate in scale, such as finding the section of the site that describes printers or completing the new proposal for the boss. And lots of tasks are small scale, like spell checking the proposal to make sure the company name is spelled right. Beneath the level of a task are individual steps.

Turn your inventory into a task hierarchy, a multilevel taxonomy of all the tasks that your individual consumer performs in pursuit of a particular goal, from large to small. At some point you may want to build a task hierarchy for each goal pursued by each of your consumers and then merge them, to see which tasks are vital to everyone, and which aren't, or where the variations occur. In this way you are creating a menu system for a set of procedures, or FAQs, showing people how the large-scale tasks relate to the others, as they drill down to the specific task they want help on. And you are beginning to see where you may need to offer separate menus for people who have different goals.

Because work often moves from one person to another, you may need to diagram the workflow to show how the same document or transaction moves from desk to desk. In this way you can create accurate scenarios for di､erent consumers, looking at things from one person's desk and then another's.

Insert the problems along the way. You'll probably want to write a way around these or offer a solution.

Extract a vocabulary—the terms that these different consumers use for the goals, the tasks, the objects they operate on, and the outcomes. For definitions, quote your consumers, if you can, rather than acting like Noah Webster.

Figure Out Who You Are Really Talking To (Con't) - Page 4
Hot Text: Web Writing that Works
Tie Consumer Profiles To Business Rules, Events, And Objects - Page 6