Monday

Analyze My Audience

Even though I'm a new technical writer here at NI, I have my own projects. My current project is documenting a feature for LabVIEW. This feature, called pane wallpaper, allows a user to set a background image in the front panel or the pane of a front panel in the software. I'm not quite sure who the target audience is for the pane wallpaper feature. To find out more information about these users, I meet with a Product Support Engineer (PSE), Bilal. Each product line has a PSE who helps bridge the gap between the Research and Development (R&D) group at NI and the NI customers. Bilal spends time helping answer customer questions, so I know he has a good idea of who needs information about pane wallpaper. So, I spend a few minutes with him, chatting about the customers likely to use the wallpaper feature. I ask him about whether the users have more technical or more business-like backgrounds, and whether they prefer step-by-step information, reference information, or high-level conceptual information. Bilal has good ideas about the users who will work with the feature, and he also gives me some good tips on finding out more about them.

Research User Needs