Understanding Your Audience

Knowing and understanding your audience helps your agency and team think about content, structure, and navigation in the future. As your agency grows, remember that understanding your audience will help you:

• Keep the needs of your users in mind.
• Understand frustrations and challenges that you can help remedy.
• Help them to accomplish their key goals, which will steer their decisions and next steps. 
• Make decisions and steer conversations among your team in the future. 

Why We Use the Web

It’s important to remember why people use the web, and what experiences they prefer to engage with when they arrive. People like websites that are:

• Easy to navigate 
• Easy to read, understand, and digest (written in plain language)
• Easy to look at (not busy)
• Easy to follow to take the next logical step

This applies to all people and all types of website content. People expect to find the information they need quickly and get easily frustrated if the path is confusing, or the content is difficult.

State of Iowa's Audience

How you refer to Iowans and the general public is dependent on context. Choose from any of the words on this list: 

• People
• Residents
• The public
• Constituents

We avoid the word “citizens” as not everyone who uses Iowa.gov and our agency sites is a citizen. Use “citizens” only when specifically writing about U.S. citizenship  –  for example, when describing who can vote in federal elections.

Questions About Your Audience

When creating content for your website, work together to answer these questions as a guidepost:

• Who is looking for this information? (e.g. constituents, students, media, general public, etc?)
• How do they search?
• Where do they look on your website for information? 
• What do they want to know? What are they searching for?
• Why do they need this information? 
• How do they plan to use this information?

Persona Statements

If it’s easier, start with audience statements. Ask yourselves these questions about your agency and the people it serves: 

• As a… [who is the target audience?]
• I want to… [what does the audience want to do?]
• so I can…[what is the audience’s goal?]

As you create or strategize content for your website, consider these equations to focus on what’s most important to the person on the other side of the screen.

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