By Corey Vilhauer CHAPTER 10These audiences will be further separated by need — after all, a poten-
tial student could be non-traditional, graduate, online or post-secondary
— and the outcomes will overlap across the audiences. You’ll end up with
a long list of audiences, a long list of outcomes...and you’ll gather a lot of
information that doesn’t fit in, either. Because when a group of editors and
marketing professionals starts talking about their customers and con-
tent, they also start talking about the failings of their current systems, the
struggles they have with internal politics, and the initiative they’ve been
pushing to implement for years.
Jackpot. Time to talk about editorial process.
(For a deeper look into audiences, outcomes and personas read my ar-
ticle for A List Apart^6 , or check out the book that inspired the article: Online
and On Mission^7 , by C. David Gammel. For a great primer on how, when and
what to ask during discovery interviews and audience interviews, read
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights^8 by Steve Portigal.)
when editors become audiences
Remember when I wrote, “we are not the audience?” I take that back. Be-
cause it’s at this point — when user audience research turns into workflow
gripes — that the fun stuff starts to surface: the editorial audiences.
Editors get content from all corners of the organization. They may be
represented by a single person, or they may be a department’s worth of
staff. They could be the CEO, or they could be a handful of interns. Editors
differ depending on the organization, industry and website, which makes
them as important a website audience as any.
While we’ve got the group together for the initial discovery meet-
ing, now’s the time to ask some sticky questions. Talk about department
siloing, about faulty workflow, and that one person who has a hard time
6 “Audiences, Outcomes, and Determining User Needs”, http://smashed.by/user-needs, 28. Feb. 2012
7 Gammel, C. David; “Online and On Mission” , http://smashed.by/online-mission
8 Portigal, Steve: “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights”, http://smashed.by/itv-users