Applied ICT A Level Unit 1 - ICT and Society
Block Four - Audience Analysis and Needs
This block begins to shift the focus on to the specific exam skills which are required in Unit 1. In particular it aims to:
- develop an understanding of how to analyse the needs of a target audience
- identify why some members of an audience may have specific needs which may cause problems for their use of ICT
- provide an opportunity to practice writing for an audience
Audience Analysis:
In your exam pre-release material (available around November 1st!) you will be presented with a scenario, The scenario will present a specific target audience for your newsletter or web pages.
Target audiences used in the past include:
- members of a motoring organisation
- students interested in careers in technology
- parents of school aged children
- policyholders of an insurance company
Before you can write content for and develop designs for your publication you will need to analyse the needs of the audience.
This means asking key questions such as:
- Who is my audience?
- What do they need?
- How will I give them that in my publication?
Audience Analysis - presentation slides
Example exam paper - this is a summary of the 2010 exam paper, which is available to download in full from the eAQA site
Who are the audience?
This is the first step. Before you can get into how the needs of the audience will impact on your publication, you need to figure out who the audience are and what they're like.
Audience Characteristics Grid - this will help you structure your initial analysis of the characteristics of your audience
Audience Characteristics Grid - Word version
Audience Needs
Now you have an idea of who the audience are you can start to develop an idea of what they might want the publication (the newsletter or web pages) to do.
Effective ways to do this involve:
- look at similar publications aimed at similar target audiences. You can use these to get some ideas about things like layout
- creating a survey and using it to find out what members of the target audience like in terms of layout, design and content (note: you need to complete more than a few surveys to do this effectively)
- interview specific members of the target audience in more detail
From this sort of analysis you can identify specific audience needs in some detail - the things your audience wants the publication to do.
From there you need to identify how each need will impact the layout and content of your publication. I find that a grid is a quite effective way to go about this as it ensures that you actually link each need to layout and content.
Impact of audience grid - a way of structuring your impact analysis to ensure you meet the markgrid requirements
The Markgrid:
You need to start to get an idea of how your exam work will be marked. This all comes down to the markgrid. You get marks by progressing along it's rows - and what do mark make?
The markgrid for row b has 3 marks available. It requires you to not only identify the audience needs but to go on to suggest specifically how they will impact the layout and content of your publication:
Note that to access the third mark you need to address, in some detail, the impact on both the layout and content of your publication.
Specific Needs:
Some members of an audience will have specific, or particular, needs. For example, some users may be partially sighted or may have difficulties reading text of a certain colour. Others may not be able to hear sounds. All of these users are, however, able to use computers effectively - and need to be able to access your publication in some form.
This is sometimes asked about specifically in exams - you may need to write about how ICT might be adapted for a particular need for example. It can also be helpful when you're considering the overall audience needs to refer to any particular need which may apply. Colour blindness, for example, is easy to adapt web pages or newsletters for. You might also want to use legislation such as the Disability Discrimination Act in your content.
Specific Needs presentation slides
I've written a blog post
about the ways in which users with specific needs use ICT. It has some links as a starting point for further reading.
Writing for an audience task - a short task which combines the skill of writing for an audience with an investigation of how the needs of a specific group are catered for