Information Architecture Series: Part 3 - Who is your target audience?

A challenge associated with information architecture is understand the needs of the target audience. The target audience can range from the customer team being used as a collaboration environment to share information amongst themselves, to an internet site presenting information for the world to see. You need to know the target audience and the expectations of the audience.

Of course you start by asking the customer questions like:
  •  Is this site only being used by the team?
  •  Will management ever need to access this site?
  •  How far up the management chain will this information need to be accessed?
  •  Are there other work teams that you interact with that need access to this information?
  •  What are your target audience’s expectation for the information?
You have your answers from the customer. So, let’s go get started!

Sike! The risk with just taking the customer’s word for it is you may end up in conflict or worse, missing a needed item. Once you have discussed the requirements with the customer, you will need to open a dialogue with the target audience. Granted, some target audience (such as the world) may be harder than others, but management or executives love to tell you what they think. Meet with management if they are the target audience and ask them what they would like to see.

I have found middle management want a view into the workflows to see where bottlenecks are located and to help remove the road blocks. They are also interested in the status reports and reporting structures.

Executive management on the other hand are more into the strategic views of dashboards with RYG indicators of project status, budgets, and resources constraints. They want to see roadmaps and vision statements. They want presentation materials from meetings long passed, and meetings yet to come. Lastly, they want to be able to access it in their busy schedule… from their mobile device.

Many SharePoint people cringe when mobile devices are mentioned…especially in SharePoint 2010 or older. Luckily, SharePoint 2013 handles the mobile experience much better. Not great, but better. There are some 3rd party products that help even more, which may be something to consider moving forward.

The target audience want or need different parts of the same data. For this reason, you may want to have targeted pages specifically for the information they require. This application of the platinum rule not only makes your group look better to the customer, but also makes the customer look better to the management levels.

There are other ways to collect this data such as using audience surveys. The challenge with that is wording the questions so that the information collected in of significant quality, and adjusting for answers with follow-up questions. For efficiency, I have found that just meeting with the people for the short time is more than enough.

Just to make sure we are not confusing you in this rabbit hole though, target audience and permissions are not the same thing. Target audience is taking information that is available in the site and presenting it in a meaningful format. Permissions prevent or allow people the ability to access information. So even though you have a target audience of executive management seeing a dashboard, it does not mean that executive management will have access to the minutia of the project.

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