What steps do we take to understand our audience?
The questions we can ask to better understand our audience and their goals.
In my last post, I discussed learning new skills as an adult and how understanding our audience allows us to set achievable goals, set an appropriate starting point for learners, chunk content into manageable doses, and design our engagement and assessment opportunities.
In this post, I want to dig deeper into the questions we should ask in order to better understand our audience. Ultimately, we should seek to understand 1) what goals our learners have in using our tech product and 2) their prior knowledge and attitudes towards learning. This week, I’ll focus just on the first question.
In instructional design, we often lump this step into the training “needs analysis,” but I think understanding our audience is important enough to highlight on its own.
Addressing question 1: What goals do our learners have in using our tech product?
Sometimes this can be tricky for our learners to answer themselves! There’s often a perception that a specific tech product can do one thing–and that’s the thing the learners say they want to do. But typically, there’s nuance around the goals a learner has, given their specific context and circumstances.
For instance, I currently work to support a social annotation tool in edtech.
My learners are largely university professors who might say their goals are:
To engage students with the course readings more deeply
Hold students accountable for completing the readings
If I stuck with these goals, my training probably won’t be bad, but it might leave a lot of learners feeling like they can’t meet their goals with our product. The professors may not find these examples useful for their particular circumstances, and decide not to use our product. How is that possible when I am designing training for their own stated goals?
I need to dig even deeper to better understand the context of their goals.
Questions to ask your learners
After supporting faculty for nearly a decade, I have a lot of background experience in what goes into the decision-making behind their courses! If you are new to designing training for your product, it might be helpful to interview the users to understand their goals more deeply.
The Shift eLearning site has a lot of great examples of questions to ask when you’re trying to learn more about the users for whom you’re developing training.
To learn more about how faculty want to use our social annotation product, I often ask:
What discipline do you teach? Is your course for majors or non-majors?
How large are your courses? In what modality do you teach?
What types of documents do you want students to annotate? Are these technical in nature?
How frequently do you want them to annotate?
What do you hope students will get out of participating in social annotation assignments?
You’ll notice that these questions look different than the ones listed in the Shift eLearning post! They aren’t really that different, though; I’ve basically finessed a lot of the questions they pose under their “Context” headline to make sense for instructors using an edtech product.
Creating hypothetical learner profiles
When designing training for more general audiences, I try to think of faculty who might answer these questions completely differently. Who are they and what are they hoping to get out of training? How can I best serve both ends of the spectrum?
I might create the following hypothetical learner profiles based on real users I’ve encountered before, or common use cases I see in working with a large number of faculty. Essentially, I take the questions I’ve listed above and answer them to draft the user profiles.
Professors Gutierrez and Stone are my hypothetical learners for social annotation. They aren’t required to take training on social annotation, or use it in their courses.
Professor Gutierrez teaches smaller history courses. They’re both asynchronous online and face-to-face courses. He wants students to annotate weekly, focusing on making connections between course topics and creating a close-knit community.
Professor Stone teaches larger chemistry courses. They’re primarily face-to-face courses. She wants to help her students build academic vocabulary and guide them through scientific research papers. She may only use social annotation in three or four readings throughout the semester.
How can creating learners profiles help your training?
Why is it important to consider your learners and what their goals are for training? They will impact your ultimate goals for training and its content. With a better understanding of the learner context and the problems they’re hoping to solve, you can best address the potential needs of all learners.
If I focused my social annotation training on the more generic end goal of student engagement and reading accountability, I may help Professor Gutierrez in seeing the value of using the product in his class, but it’s likely I wouldn’t convince Professor Stone that the tool is useful for her. Drafting hypothetical learner profiles allows me to better understand user goals at a deeper level, allowing me to design training to address broader user needs and demonstrate product value to the user.
Here, I’ve discussed understanding your audience’s goals and how to start drafting user profiles to do so. Next, I’ll discuss how their prior knowledge and training attitude can impact your learning design.
In this post, I focused on what goals our learners have in using our tech product. Next week, I’ll address:
Learner prior knowledge and attitudes toward training
How this can impact your hypothetical user profiles
…How all this can impact your training goals and ultimately, your training content
How do user goals differ among the users of the product(s) you support?
Share in the comments below!
Thanks for reading and see you soon!