The Future of Design Education Pt. 15
Primary / Secondary Audience
Defining an audience is a foundational step in UX design. As I begin the writing of a book on the future of education, I have found myself with a hypothesis for this endeavor. This will be a key component in my own discovery process as I step further into researching the audiences for said book.
How to determine your target audience
From a designer perspective, identifying a target audience is no ease feat. It often takes a considerable amount of resources (time, money, people) to accurately identify an audience. Historically speaking, there is often an assumed target audience — people often ‘think’ they know or have a sense for this kind of thing, or more often, people ‘want’ a particular audience to be their customer.
And so, it is necessary to remove a designers orientation so as to not infiltrate a perceived audience without that actually being a real thing. With this book, I have a few audiences in mind, but of course must get into it to fully determine if that is accurate.
Know thy Persona
As a matter of pining down an audience, I have a primary, secondary and tertiary persona identified. I am quite open to whether this writing is better as a singular focus, or if their are multiple audiences. Let me explain.
Primary Audience
The first target audience I have identified is the group I teach — new designers getting into the profession — providing a resource to better support their full impact as new designers — aligning the full longview of their careers and orientation. This makes the most sense to me as an educator as my students are my users in teaching user experience design.
Secondary Audience
The title of these posts are a clear indicator that more must be done to fully prepare designers for the future. And so, a secondary audience could very well be positioned to educators in academic institutions and Bootcamp settings. This also makes great sense as a basis for providing a resource other educators can leverage in their programs.
Tertiary Audience
Lastly, I can imagine an audience for this book being mangers of designers. Preparing leaders of teams to reimagine what it will take to build a team of individuals that behold the necessary attributes to tackle todays buggiest (Not s typo) challenges. This would change the focus a bit, but could certainly work well as a guide for building a cohesive culture and continual upskilling a design teams talent.
Timeboxed for 15 mins [ ]

