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2. Identify the particular problems or communications challenges faced
by someone working in that context (i.e., establish a persona for the product's user that prescribes
what we must write about).
3. Perform an audience analysis focused on those challenges to
determine which audience members or classes of members will encounter those problems, and
why (i.e., collect descriptive information that tells us how to write).
4. Identify potential solutions to the problems, implement them, and
test them to confirm that we've actually solved the reader's problems.
An example illustrates how this approach actually works in practice. Writers
commonly believe that our audience uses online help only reluctantly, and respond by spending
considerable time improving the quality of our help systems. A help system may certainly be
badly written or badly designed, so efforts to improve our help design and creation skills remain
important, yet improving help files sometimes targets the wrong problem. Speaking at STC's 48th
annual conference, one speaker confirmed what I've found in my own work by reporting four
reasons why our audience may not use online help. Two are relevant to my example:
- Many users don't know that the help system exists.
- Those who do know about the help system often don't know how to use it.
This demonstrates how adopting a persona ("I've encountered a problem and want to
learn how to solve it") can lead to an important solution: By taking on the user's role, we discover
we must first decide where to seek help (for online help, we must know that such things exist),
then must figure out how to use it. Without adopting the role of a user of the help system, we
might simply assume that our audience knows that help exists and understands how to use it. A
prescriptive approach to this situation could proceed as follows:
solve it.
1. Context: Users encounter a problem and must find and use our online help to
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