Before You Define Your Audience
Youjin Jeon
Table of Contents
In marketing, the term “targeting” is often used to describe different processes broadly. For one, targeting is a task defining a group of people to identify the people who are most likely to become your audience from the market. Also, targeting is a strategy for finding effective ways to deliver your message. In other words, targeting is to analyze the desires and needs of people who are expected to use specific products and services, then design the contents to suit this purpose.
The Friendly Error System (FES) aims to deliver a kinder, more effective message to our recipients. As the name suggests, for FES to better serve its purpose, it is necessary to think about where or who the message is being directed, focusing on the message’s recipient. This is slightly different from optimized targeting: narrowing down or re-grouping your target group. Instead, this process will be closer to a delicate examination of blind spots that may arise from the act of defining a group of people as your target audience.
What do we mean by “a beginner”?
First and foremost, let’s consider the pitfalls of defining the audience as “beginners.” In the Contributor Docs,🌸 p5.js Friendly Error System (FES) section from the p5js Contributor Docs FES claims the design “aims to help new programmers,” which, at first glance, seems innocent at labeling its audience with an agent noun. However, what needs to be considered in this process is not the matter of word choice but rather the attitude of making blind assumptions about its audience, that is, the receiver of the information (error message). We need to think about the problems that may arise when we simply equate the readers of the friendly error messages with people in need of kindness just because FES promotes kindness. Also, we need to be alert about which human experience is erased and limited when we hastily reduce our audience to “beginners.”
Describing a reader of our messages as a novice leads to various controversies. First, it creates an artificial category that is labeled “beginner” based on an assumption that our readers are novices. There may be cases where readers would willingly identify with the term and use it as a part of their learning experience. Even so, consider how complex and relative the concept of skill proficiency is. If we assign one beginner, intermediate, or advanced label solely based on the years you have been dealing with code, what would be the right cut-off values?
One’s skill proficiency level is difficult to determine and shifts based on the context. Even experienced programmers occasionally encounter an unfamiliar bug or indecipherable error message. We have accustomed to the so-called “rank” hierarchy, in which one’s mastery of the technology is described with discrete “levels” or ranks for convenience. This structure is widespread and easily seen in various parts of the tech field and its adjacents such as schools, textbooks, platforms, and communities. Nonetheless, how valid are those skill level distinctions in actual programming tasks? Why is it necessary to have habitual hierarchies in the tech space? What do we gain from such structure, and what do we lose?
Don't limit your audience of the message
Inclusive Microsoft Design: Inclusive 101argues that the definition of disability should be expanded from simply referring to a person’s physical condition to a mutual mismatch between society and the individual. It proposes a perspective on disability as a social problem that classifies and excludes disability rather than seeing it as an individual problem. Furthermore, disability includes how society defines and handles disability, and thus constructs and consolidates related ideologies and preconceived notions. It also emphasizes that “disability” and “exclusion” can be temporary and variable “experiences” and “situations” that anyone can face. This argument on disability applies to people who will benefit from Friendly Errors. Anyone can experience a situation they would benefit from a friendly error messages and in this sense the label “beginner” becomes unnecessary and uncomfortable.
Therefore using the label “beginners” may cause the unwanted result of limiting the audience of the friendly errors. Rather than narrowing down the scope of the friendly errors, what will happen if we open it up, acknowledging that even seasoned programmers may occasionally need such debugging aids? Most importantly, the expression “Friendly Design” should not become a divider that separates “people who need Friendly Design” from “people who do not need Friendly Design.” Friendliness, or kindness can exist without the presupposition of hierarchy or division.
We can reject the impulse to prescribe a certain label to our audience and continue this attitude by finding the right tone for error messages. Some UX guidelinesThese quotes from guidelines warn UX writers to be careful not to place responsibility on users or to blame users:
(1) Apple Human Interface Guidelines >> Alerts >> “Avoid sounding accusatory, judgmental, or insulting.”
(2) MS Windows App Development >> Error Message Guidelines >> “Do not make the user feel at fault even if the problem is the result of a user error.” from tech companies warn against “blaming users” or using accusatory voice in error messages. This judgemental attitude would be against our goal to practice kindness. Also, we need to remember that any design guideline will reflect how technology producers position their audience. Recall that targeting can succeed without revealing its strategy. In addition, it is hard to predicate the causality between the user’s action and the error. Therefore, we should note that presuming or making assumptions can easily lead to bias or reinforce existing biases. In that sense, when setting the audience, it is necessary to check whether an unnecessary division is made and whether we are imprisoning someone to a specific set of characters.
Subtleties of kindness
Maybe some unavoidable dilemmas must have been born at the moment when FES started out with the word “friendliness” or kindness in its own name. In our everyday life, we all perceive kindness relatively depending on the recipient of kindness, the degree of desired kindness, and the overall context. At the same time, we can think of this problem as a conflict between the effectiveness of language and ethical values. Even in the example above, expression with an agent noun ( -er) can be linguistically simple and easy to convey. Still, we should be mindful that this approach can oversimplify certain concepts or create unnecessary meanings just to pursue convenience.
For translation tasks, we do need to find our audience; however, we should not carelessly define or label our audience for that reason. The targeting of FES should correspond to its fundamental goal to practice kindness, avoiding objectifying or otherizing. What would happen if we focus on the question “what is kindness?” rather than “who will be our customers?”And the conversation about kindess will continue at [0: Friendly? 🤔 A hole in "friendliness"] section, and expands into the discussions on [2: care, respect, and an open mind]. In the end, the gist of FES translation is a search for practical kindness for people, from those who just started learning code to life-long coders.