Dawn loves solving problems, whether it is related to content strategy and management for her clients or to help her out of an Escape Room. She teaches minimalism in writing, but does not practice it in her life — having just put up 50 Christmas trees with over 6000 ornaments in her home this past holiday season. She loves Disney and has decorated her office with Disney villains to remind her employees of her true nature.

One Size Fits No One

To improve the customer experience through our content, we must fully understand who our customer is and what it is they need and expect. Often, however, technical communicators are forced into a one-size fits all approach to content. We appeal to the unknown masses, attempting to meet the needs of any person of any experience in any context, but in reality leaving it up to the individual to find their specific needle in our haystack of information. We must face the fact that one size fits no one.

With that acceptance, however, comes the question of how then do we adapt to the customer, rather than making the customer adapt to us? What parts of audience profiling really affect our approach? How do we gather that information? How can we accommodate different audience profiles without breaking the bank? What is the impact of leaving someone out of the equation?

This workshop explores these questions through a variety of interactive exercises using Legos and the other participants to identify user analysis techniques that get to the critical, and addressable, audience differentiators and subsequent approaches to structure our content accordingly.

In this workshop, attendees will learn:

• The critical differentiators between audience members
• Methods for gathering data about these differentiators
• Approaches for sizing and structuring content to accommodate these differentiators

Are You My Customer?

To improve the customer experience through our content, we must fully understand who our customer is and what it is they need and expect. Unfortunately, many technical communicators do not have direct access to customers to create user profiles or verify assumptions. Following the model of the Dr.Seuss book Are You My Mother?, this presentation explores the process of identifying target customers. While searching for the appropriate customer, our hero encounters a variety of possibilities, including subject matter experts, trainers, support personnel, and even artificial intelligence, asking each “Are you my customer?”

In this session, attendees will learn:

• What characteristics are important to identify customers
• Strategies for finding those customers
• How to overcome obstacles on the way to meeting customers