Dialog Box

Right on target: Designing for your audience

by Luanne Seymour

While working as a graphic designer at Adobe in 1988, I had a big argument about a book design with the person who was then in charge of Adobe’s technical publications group. Academically, she was more qualified than me to spout opinions about instructional design. She had a Ph.D. in Documentation from Carnegie Mellon. I only had a BFA in Graphic Design from California College of Arts and Crafts. However, I had a qualification that made my opinion extremely valuable, doctorate notwithstanding. I was a typical member of the target audience for the book in question.

Understand who your audience is

What we didn’t agree on was the page layout of a tutorial book that had step-by-step instructions for techniques in Adobe Illustrator® and Adobe Photoshop®. In her opinion, each technique should start with an introduction, followed by an in-depth explanation of the technique and tools used, and then the step-by-step technique written in long paragraphs with occasional accompanying graphics.

Figure 1: A re-creation of my co-worker’s book design, which I felt included too much text for the target audience of visual artists.

My idea for the perfect tutorial design was much different. I had formulated a theory that visual artists like me digest information the way that I read newspapers and magazines—in four stages.

1. Scan the headlines to see what the content is about.
2. Look at the pictures to see what the content is about.
3. If the pictures are compelling, read the captions.
4. If the headlines, pictures and captions are compelling, read the rest of the copy—if I have time.

My design for the book was a little bit more like a comic book design. Each step was illustrated with a simple graphic and accompanying text. My philosophy was (and is) that you should be able to figure it out 90% of the time by just looking at the pictures.

Figure 2: My design concept for a book geared toward visual artists.

While she might have been an expert at documentation, my co-worker didn’t fully understand the audience. Her approach might have been successful for a different audience—people who like to read lots of text, perhaps. But it wasn’t the right approach for this audience—busy visual artists who learn better from a set of well-designed sequential images with minimal text.

Understand how your audience accesses information

In 1997, Web Usability Expert, Jakob Nielsen, wrote an article called, “How Users Read on the Web.” He claims that people don’t read web pages, they scan them for information. His research shows that when people are looking for information, they scan the page and read the key words, meaningful subheadings, and bulleted lists. Check out his interesting eye-tracking study from April 2006 to read more about how users view web pages today: F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content.

You might think that I’m comparing apples to oranges when discussing a 1987 book design versus web design in 2006. I don’t think so. True, reading a printed piece is easier on the eyes than reading text on-screen. However, busy people don’t have time to spend plowing through lots of text to get to the few nuggets of information they truly need. (Writers don’t like to hear this.) In 2006, people access many resources when trying to find information. As designers, it’s our job to constantly reevaluate how our audience digests the graphic designs we create—no matter what form they take.

Figure 3: Heatmaps from user eyetracking studies of three websites. The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. (Image and caption © 2006, Jakob Nielsen.)

In recent Adobe software user surveys, we’ve found that searching application Help systems and the Internet, reading books, and logging on to forum discussions are some of the main ways that our users look for instructional information when they are stuck on how to use their software. My Adobe Design Center partner, Jen deHaan, and I regularly analyze web metric information on Design Center. We find out which tutorials are the most visited or what are the most common search words. Knowing these things helps us determine who our audience is and what types of things they are looking for. We are constantly defining and redefining who our audience is and how they use our instructional content. To communicate effectively, the designer must know who their audience is and how they are best communicated with.

Be willing to redesign

In my former career as a classroom teacher, I learned a valuable lesson about understanding my audience. I had to teach a lesson about drug awareness and safety to my first grade class. It was my first year as a teacher and I had never taught this lesson before. The teaching kit contained lots of posters and stories and a badly made, ugly little frog puppet. Being a novice teacher with little time to design my own lessons, I decided to follow the canned lesson plan in the kit. It went against my grain because I usually customized my lessons and the thought of using this really silly puppet repelled me. (The whole idea was kind of embarrassing.) But I pulled out the frog puppet and literally read right from the lesson plan script. Suddenly I realized that the eyes of the students were glued to the puppet and they didn’t care that I was reading from a script. The ugly little frog mesmerized them. The students laughed and squealed with delight and answered the puppet’s questions as though he were alive. It was one of their favorite lessons and they begged for the frog puppet every day after that.

Figure 4: Knowing who your audience is will help you understand how best to communicate with them.

What this taught me was that in my reluctance to use the puppet, I had forgotten who my audience was. I was thinking more about myself and my own discomfort with the delivery method. I wasn’t putting myself in the shoes of a six-year-old and thinking about how best to reach him or her. As designers and writers, we often tend to stick with what we’re more comfortable with or even what we like. We forget that our audience might have completely different tastes, needs, or demographics than us. A designer in his 20s might forget that most people over 40 cannot read 7-point type on a business card or menu. My colleague with the Ph.D. in Documentation was not putting herself in the shoes of her audience. Fortunately, we chose not to use her design idea and the book was the first in a very successful series of step-by-step technique books.

Effective and successful designers test their designs on the intended audience while still in the draft stage. It’s a frightening but necessary part of the design process. Designers must be empathetic with their audience. They need to ask themselves constantly, “How will people receive this design?” Ask friends or colleagues who are willing to be honest with you to give you feedback on your designs. Ask people who are different from you to respond to your work. Ask people who are older than you, or are a different gender, culture, or race. Get their first impressions because those count for a lot. Once you have some feedback, be willing to go back to the drawing board and change things until you know you are reaching your intended audience.

This philosophy can call into question our whole motivation for being designers. Do we just want to design cool things, or do we want to design things that communicate the intended message effectively? The best designers have figured out how to do both—most of the time. Communicating successfully with your target audience is what good design is all about.