Focus on your audience when creating content

Before you begin working on your content, identify your audience. To whom are you presenting your information or product? Why are you providing this information or product to them? If you answer the previous questions, it will help you focus on your audience. When you focus on your audience, your content will align with their needs and desires. Audiences will feel satisfied approve of your content or product if you meet their needs and desires.

Audiences come in all flavors. They are not limited to users but include stakeholders, the people funding your work and salary. When writing or designing, you need to remember who your bosses are. If you don’t fulfill their needs, they can rescind your project. However, don’t overload your focus on stakeholders. Users should always come first. You will need to maneuver how to appease stakeholders while drawing users into your writing and design plans.

Another audience to remember is yourself. “Yourself?” you may ask. I was surprised to learn this fact too. Some documentation is beneficial only to you and doesn’t require you to present to others. For example, if I’m working on drafting a paper, I might create a mind map to jot down ideas. I consider the mind map valuable because it helps me formulate ideas to begin writing. However, to my professor, a mind map is useless. If I handed my mind map in with my paper, my professor won’t understand its purpose. Additionally, some of the trashed ideas of the mind map may distract them from the purpose of my project. Overall, they’ll become confused. Sometimes simple is better.