Just curious about this one. One of my professors is having us do audience analysis' and drafts of each project we do for the course.
I can see the drafts being necessary to an extent (we are just talking the outline, not even going into designing phase yet). But the audience analysis? How many of you out there actually use them in your position?
We do audience analysis all the time where I work. It can help to make sure we don't create systems that seem silly (read as "stupid") or crazy hard for our users. In fact my team recently hired in some usability consultants because we hadn't been conducting proper audience analysis for the several years before I started on the team. As a result much of our content was being ignored because it didn't play directly to our target audience and went either way under their skill level or so far over that they couldn't understand the content or how to use the applications at all.
On a side note, usually the audience analysis can be reused if you are targeting the same audience (such as where I work and target employees).
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