This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Talking to the Users
Those domain experts know their stuff, don’t they? It’s so useful to draw on their experience and soak up their knowledge. But it’s not the whole story. Unless you’re making a product for those experts, you have a whole other group to consider: your audience.
Who are the target users of your product? Who’s the audience for your content? These are the folks your work serves. Not the client. Not the boardroom. Content is for use. Anyone engaging with your product does so because they have underlying needs and questions. Maybe they need to understand mortgages. Perhaps they’re looking to restore a vintage sports car. Could be they’re just dying to know what cool and funny baby-panda-on-a-slide videos are out there.
Go talk with them. Your experts have armed you with enough context to understand the subject. When you listen to users enthuse, you’ll have at least some idea of what they’re talking about. You’ll find their take on the subject a little different from the SMEs’.
Different Terms
Depending on the subject, a correct “expert” term may differ from common usage. What we might call a “magic trick” is something a professional magician would term an “illusion” or “effect.” The wonderful-sounding “grawlix” helps comic-book artists cover up their @#$%&!-ing foul language. Building a medical symptom checker? Maybe don’t file content under “xerostomiath” if your general reader wants help with plain ol’ “cotton-mouth.”
Differences matter. They tell us where the worldview of the expert diverges from the view of the audience. It’s not always as simple as a one-for-one substitution of terms. Sometimes what looks like one concept unpacks into several under expert scrutiny. We assumed a conference had a bunch of associated speakers. Then we learned about speakers, keynotes, hosts, and a bunch of other volunteer roles.
Different Levels of Detail
Once, we were developing an app for a video game store. We wanted to learn about game consoles, so we engaged with a community of collectors. These guys knew everything, from the age of Atari to the present day. We knew there were different consoles released by manufacturers (we know our Super NES from our Wii), but we learned that almost every console had many model variants during its lifetime. And that some of those variants were available in different limited editions. Yet when we spoke to casual video game enthusiasts, none of those details came up. Oh sure, they’d argue the relative merits of PlayStation versus Xbox. But to them, these were just competing formats in the same way people once compared VHS and Betamax. Ask your parents.
Experts help us go deep on the fascinating nuances of a subject, but users remind us what’s important. Remember that your product exists to respect and reflect the interests of your audience. Cross-reference information from both parties. Aim for a product that balances expert authority with audience-appropriateness. Experts map the world; users mark the points of interest.
Existing Research
Every organization has a ton of research material, even if they don’t know it. Audience segmentation reports. Focus group studies. Even sales figures. There are all kinds of places to find out what’s working for the business and what’s not. Stuff to help you figure out who the customers are and what they need. And many organizations have whole departments dedicated to helping customers get what they need. They call them customer service teams. These folks aren’t without their own bias (recent complaints from shouty or important customers have a habit of becoming high-priority feature requests), but still they’re a valuable source of customer insight.
Website analytics can be a great way to learn your users’ language. If people visited you by entering a search query on Google, which terms did they use? If your site has its own search, you can go further still. When people type into that search box, they’re telling you the content they want and the terms they use to describe it. Look for the trends there and add them to the list of inputs that inform your terminology decisions.
