Value of Audience

1. Value of Audience Kanika Kals English 393

2. What is audience? • Imagined interpreters of our product. • Voices in our heads guiding our decisions during the design process.

3. Relationship with Audience • Our relationship with our audience is constantly changing throughout the design process. - At first, our audience may be categories of users based on organizational roles or level of experience. - After some field studies, our audience may be particular users we interviewed or observed.

4. Relationship with Audience - When we write, the audience is an imagined user whose voice we hear in our heads as we make design decisions. - When we evaluate our designs for usability, our audience is real users who we can observe and interview. - When we start a new project, our audience will include all of our previous experiences with the audience – both real and imagined.

5. How has rhetoric treated audience? • Classical Rhetoric • - Audience was an important consideration of classical rhetoric, especially to Aristotle, who identified audience as one of the three elements that created the speech (speaker, subject, and audience).

6. How has rhetoric treated audience? • New Rhetoric • - According to new rhetoric, if writers followed the proper form to express an existing truth, then audiences were expected to respond favorably.

7. How has rhetoric treated audience? • Expressivist Rhetoric • Expressivist rhetoric holds that writing is an art, a means of self-discovery and expression, that is endangered by considerations of audience.

8. How has rhetoric treated audience? • Neo-Classical Rhetoric • Returned to the classical roots of Aristotle’s rhetoric where audience played an important role in the creation of effective texts. • Believed in the concept of a universal audience that could be addressed by the writer.

9. What is the value of information about audience? • Learning to be more user-centered • Improving Design

10. Learning to be more user-centered • Without exposure to audience, we cannot design effective, user-centered products. • Through analyzing information about audience, we can gain valuable insights into their problems, preferences, and situations that can later influence our design decisions.

11. Improving Design • By building our experience throughobservations of audience behavior, we can become better designers.

12. In sum, audience means: • Intended users for whom we are designing our products • Real users of our products who actually end up using them • Voices of imagined users inside our heads guiding our design decisions • Ourselves, especially when we have no concept of the real user

13. Questions?