Technical communication is user-centered: as we learned in Section 2.2, understanding your audience–their goals, their expectations, and their needs–is a key component to addressing a rhetorical situation and communicating effectively. Below we first discuss audience analysis and the importance of working with and listening to your audience, and then focus on the importance of document design and accessibility in technical communication.

Centering your audience

When we asked our Technical Communication Advisory Board to talk about how diversity, equity, and inclusion impact their work, they responded with various examples. Overwhelmingly, a touchstone of each example was the importance of their audience. Technical communicators MUST center their specific audience in the work that they do; centering their audience is a key to considering diversity, equity, and inclusion.

One important thing to consider regarding technical communication and your audience is that you are rarely writing for an imaginary, universal audience. Your audience, rather, will often be predetermined and specific. Even if you are writing for a broad audience, remember that that audience is made up of specific, individual people, with their own identities, values, experiences, etc., all of which impact the way they interact with a text and the way they make sense of information.

As a technical communicator, it is important that you are writing for your audience rather than for yourself. In order to write for your audience, you must get to know your audience, understand their needs and context, and make sure that you have them in mind as you write and revise your text. So, how do you get to know your audience? If you are a 25-year-old college educated midwesterner living in an urban area, how do you write for an audience of retired adults living in rural Minnesota? In order to consider your audience’s needs it’s also important to consider how your own experiences–your age, race, gender, education, culture, etc.–impact the way you move through the world. Then, work to get to know your audience, not only in an abstract way, but by really asking or considering how their experiences will impact how they interact with this text.

How can you get to know your audience? One important thing to keep in mind is that you want to avoid reducing your audience to a set of stereotypes: we can try to understand how different categories of people might interact with your text and information, but each individual person has a unique set of experiences, knowledge, beliefs, etc. Further, some things about your audience’s identity might be important to this particular writing situation, and some things may not be. One way to get to know your audience’s needs is to try to learn as much as you can about them. Another way might be to consider how you can develop a collaborative, working and learning relationship with your audience.

One way to really focus on what your audience needs in a text is through usability testing, which we talk more about in Section 4 when describing the common genre of instructions. Usability testing asks potential users to interact with a text and to provide direct feedback, or to provide indirect feedback through observation and techniques like think aloud protocol (asking users to verbalize their thought process as they complete a task). For example, you might ask a group of four users to follow your instructions for building a deck or planting a tree, and observe how they actually interact with the instructions as they complete the task. Where did they struggle? What seemed clear and easy for them? Where did they have to reread or repeat a step? Where could the instructions be improved for clarity or to be more user friendly?

You might also ask your target audience–or some members of your target audience–to collaborate with you by giving you feedback or providing something like “peer review” comments on a draft of your document. This way you don’t have to guess at how a reader might respond to something; instead, you can get a response from a “real” reader and apply that feedback to another draft.

Working directly with your target audience, or some part of your target audience, is the best way to be audience centered in your communication design. However, sometimes you don’t have the opportunity for direct feedback or collaboration with your audience, and so you might instead take a research approach in order to understand their needs and perspectives.

The University of Minnesota has a usability lab that does this type of testing and research. The department of Writing Studies also offers an entire course in usability testing and UX design. This text will only scratch the surface of usability, but for our purposes, remember that usability is another area where it is important to consider diversity, equity, and inclusion by centering your audience’s experience rather than your own. It is also important to know that there are specific techniques and approaches for gathering audience feedback (more on this when we describe instructions).

Document design, audience, and accessibility

Document design

One key component to user experience, and one component that impacts access to content, is document design. Usability testing will often help you to make decisions not only about content but about the design of the document. Consider the last three websites that you interacted with; was one easy to navigate? What made it easier? Was one particularly difficult to navigate? What made it more difficult? Document design, when done in a way that promotes accessibility, can often seem “invisible”; however, the way that information is arranged on a page, how and whether the organization is clear, and choices about using images and different fonts make a huge difference in whether users can access information.

As you probably know by this point, one key component of document design flexibility: there is not one way to organize a document that can be systematically applied across all instances of technical communication. Once again, when making decisions about document design, you must consider the rhetorical situation AND, especially, your specific audience and their needs. Once again, usability testing is one way to get direct feedback from your audience, and to see how they interact with a text. Remember that document design should increase access; your work as a technical communicator is to remove barriers to information whenever you can.

Although there is no “one size fits all” approach to document design, there are approaches and best practices that you can follow. One useful tool to consider document design is referred to as the HATS approach: Headings, Access, Typography, and Space. You can click through a helpful and easy to follow slide deck at Purdue University’s online writing center.

Headings, and other organizational cues, are so important for reader access because they allow readers to understand how content fits together. They also make documents more easily scannable or searchable. The above linked slide deck walks you through the HATS design principles, which you can apply to any document you create or revise.

Some other guiding principles of document design include contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity, and balance.

Contrast signals to your reader that something should stand out or be paid close attention to compared to the rest of the document. For example, consider a WARNING! In a set of instructions.

Repetition lets a document feel cohesive or unified. Repetition in document design also helps a reader to understand how information fits together. Repetition also allows for contrast to be effective: without most font choices or headings looking the same, that boldfaced warning would not stand out to a reader.

Alignment refers to how text is positioned, in relation to other text and to images, on a page. Text and images can be right, center, or left aligned, for example. When making choices about alignment, consider your audience’s expectations and how they will likely interact with this text based on genre or cultural conventions.

Proximity means things that are related to each other should appear near to each other. In other words, readers will make assumptions about content relationships based on where things are placed on a page, whether they are near or far to other things. So, information that belongs together should be grouped or chunked together; information that does not belong together should not be grouped together.

Balance means that images and text are positioned in a way so that the page does not seem like one side is too “heavy” or “light.” Balance is important because of how users interact with items on a page. White space should be used strategically, to signal organization or help to chunk content; if one side of a page is very text or image heavy and the other side contains mostly white space, consider how that feels unbalanced (and unsettling) for a reader.

If you search for something like “principles of document design,” you will find similar if slightly different takes on what these key principles are. Some say that there are five guiding principles, some include seven, etc. However, each slightly different approach or theory of document design points to the same rhetorical principles: know your audience and act intentionally when making choices in your document.

Audience

Understanding principles of document design are a helpful place to start. However, knowing your audience ALSO impacts the choices you make about document design. Consider what your audience expects, what they need, how they will likely interact with your text. Consider specific ways that your document design can fit the needs of your target audience. Some questions to consider include:

1. How do cultural expectations impact your design choices? (culture can be very broadly conceived of, and might apply to any number of things that make up the cultural identity or association of your audience)
2. How can my decisions about document design impact accessibility?
3. How do I consider social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in my document design?
4. What are some ethical considerations that I need to be aware of when I make decisions about document design?

None of these questions has an easy answer, and each one will depend largely upon the rhetorical situation of that communication task (considering the audience, purpose, context, etc.). However, it’s good to reflect on these questions and to become more informed about the relationships between document design, audience, social justice, and ethics.

Let’s start with number 1: How do cultural expectations impact your design choices?

First, consider how you understand “culture.” What cultures do you belong to? There are very broad ways to define culture, like nationality (I live in the United States and identify as culturally as American). But culture is multilayered and complex; maybe I live in Minneapolis, which has its own culture, and is also in some ways impacted by the culture of Minnesota, and of the United States. My family is Islamic, which also impacts my cultural identification, and my mother and father were raised in New York City, which again has its own mix of linguistic culture.

Cultural expectations impact a text when it comes to choices we make about language, font, style, use of color, images, directness or indirectness, how we tell a story or incorporate research…nearly every choice we make as communicators is touched by the various cultures that we belong to. Design choices, in particular, are impacted by culture. Various colors, for example, may signal different things across different cultures. Or, cultural expectations may change based on whatever a given audience is used to seeing.

As an exercise, find a website for an international company (McDonalds is a great example). Take a look at their webpages for different countries. Try to pay attention only to things like color, images, and document design. Which things change? What remains constant?

As a technical communicator, it is important to consider potential cultural impact and differences when it comes to your design choices. How might your audience read certain design features? How can you make choices that are tailored to a specific audience?

Accessibility

Let’s move now to document design and access with reflection question 2: How can my decisions about document design impact accessibility? 

One of the most crucial jobs of a technical communicator is to ensure that the information they create is accessible to their target audience. Some key questions to consider when making choices about document design and accessibility include:

• Can my audience immediately see how the content is organized?
• Am I using various communication modes (such as graphics of visuals alongside text) in order to illustrate information for my audience?
• Are there markers (such as headings) that help my reader understand how information connects?
• Have I considered how visually impaired audiences can access information? Have I made choices (like including closed captions) for audiences that have trouble accessing information through audio?
• Is the language that I’m using clear and accessible? Will my target audience understand it?
• Are the color choices, font, paragraph breaks used in a way that makes reading easier for my audience?
• Do my choices about font size and type make it easy for my reader to understand how information is organized and which parts of that information are most important or crucial?

One seemingly basic element of document design and access is readability. Consider the things that impact readability, like font size, organizational visual cues (like headings, boldface font, italics, use of white space), and shorter paragraphs. Consider how your reader will interact with this text (on their phone? On a computer? On a piece of paper delivered home with their child? On a poster handing in the student union?). Design choices that are readable on a poster, for example, may not work as well on a website. The interface matters when you consider user experience.

As you assess a new communication situation, consider all the factors that impact your audience’s ability to access that information. Language and content are important, but elements such as design also impact your audience’s experience with that text.

Universal design

When focusing on accessibility, another important approach is called universal design, which considers how a document might be accessible to a wide or general audience by building accessibility into the core features of the document. University design moves away from thinking of accessibility as an “afterthought” or an “add-on” and instead makes access the focus or foundation of document design. One example of universal design would be: if I am creating a video for one of the courses that I teach, or if I am creating an instructional video for tiling a bathroom, I would not wait until I had a specific student or user who was hard of hearing to go back to that video and create a text transcript available only to that student or user. Instead, closed captions would be part of the initial design of that video. The principles of universal design emphasize that making content more accessible to one person makes content more accessible to everyone. So, any number of students or users may have an easier time accessing information in the video if they could watch with closed captions, whether or not they had trouble accessing the audio. Universal design says that accessibility features should be built into the design for any audience member.

Document design should always be concerned with access and accessibility. And as a technical communicator, a key skill that you’ll develop is listening and responding to the needs of your audience. Question 3 asks: How do I consider social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in my document design? 

Take a moment to reflect on this question; then consider how document design works towards inclusion or against inclusion. The answer to question 4 has a lot to do with centering your audience’s experience and making document design choices that make information more accessible and, therefore, more inclusive. Considering diversity in your document design means that you consider an audience that is not homogenous. Your audience is made up of a variety of individuals, each with cultural, social, individual contexts and experiences. Engaging diverse audience members in usability testing or in focus groups to gather and incorporate feedback is a good step towards centering diversity in document design. It is important to listen to your audience: if something about the document design doesn’t work for them, how can you change it? How can you make it more accessible?

Another way to center diversity, equity, inclusion, and work towards social justice in your document design is to consider frequently or historically marginalized audience members. Consider whose voices are not often taken into account. Some questions to reflect on might be: who is my imagined audience? Who is my “default” user? Who am I leaving out, and how can I push my own boundaries in order to include marginalized voices in my design process?

Ethics, access, and language

Finally, let’s consider question 4: What are some ethical considerations that I need to be aware of when I make decisions about content and access? 

Ethics and access are closely connected in technical communication. One way that you can consider ethics has to do with making sure that the language you use is accessible to your audience. Along with document design, the language used in a document can greatly influence accessibility.

One way to consider the ethics of language usage comes up in conversations about plain language (sometimes called plain English). Plain language refers to a movement toward making complex information accessible by removing overly complex language choices or jargon that would (intentionally or unintentionally) exclude some members of your audience. Using plain language means choosing language that is more widely understood and accessible; in this way, more accessible language means more accessible information. Take a moment to complete this reading on plain language and consider what it means for technical communication and ethics. 

Consider, for example, a contract. The reading describes a move away from legalese towards plain language or plain English: something that would be more accessible for a broader range of readers. Legal jargon or overly complex language can act as a barrier to information–sometimes intentionally. Take a moment to think about who benefits from a contract written in complex or unfamiliar language.

It may seem obvious that an ethical goal of communication, and one that cares about equity and access, is to use language that is clear and simple enough so that your reader can understand your content, even (and especially!) when that content is very complex. However, not everyone agrees that simple language is best. One argument against the use of plain language is that it “dumbs down” the work. In other words, there are those that argue plain language overly simplifies complex content to the point that it is no longer accurate.

The difficult work of a technical communicator, whether you are creating content for the department of public health that informs the community about preventing the spread of Covid-19 or you are creating a terms of use or contract for a cell phone company, is to make often very complicated and complex information accessible AND accurate. One way to do this work is to collaborate with subject matter experts (SME) and to use a variety of strategies (images, text, headings, document design) that assist your reader. And, along with these other strategies, it is important to work towards language that is clear and accessible without compromising the complexity of your content. Remember always that the goal is access and equity and that it is important to listen to feedback and remain flexible!