Audiences and the Web

As with any type of professional communication, effectively meeting the needs of audiences for a website should be a primary goal of writers and designers. Unlike other types of professional communication, however, websites offer audiences unique opportunities to "co-construct" the website each time they enter it. In other words, because of the web's hypertext quality individual readers create unique sequences of information as they move around a website or among different websites. At a minimum, the sequence of links a reader selects leads to an individual interpretation of the information.

When websites are audience-focused, readers can easily construct their own paths through online text by choosing their own sequence of links. Researcher Paul Levinson calls this "empowerment of the author through the empowerment of readers." Simply put, hypertext documents allow writers and audiences to link related concepts and restructure knowledge. A document that is read interactively is rarely experienced the same way twice. Different readers can arrive at the same point in a document but have discovered different things along the way because they activated different links. Hypertext environments that offer readers this empowerment respect audience needs.

Audience—"Readers" or "Users"?

The interactive quality of the web significantly changes the way people access and use information. The web combines reading and other activities in ways that allow audiences to "do" things on websites that they don't do with print documents. Because finding and reading information on the web requires people to manipulate the browser and webpage navigation features, audiences on the web are often referred to as "users" rather than "readers."

The purpose of your site also determines the extent to which your site is meant to be "read" or "used." Will people go to your site to read information and research papers from a non-profit foundation? Will people use your site to make airline reservations and pay for tickets? Will they play games with other people accessing your site from different locations? The vast differences in the purposes of websites suggests a continuum of interactivity that designers should consider. To varying degrees, audiences on the web are always readers and users simultaneously. But thinking of audiences as "users" (a popular term in the computer hardware and software industries) is a reminder that designers are creating, in some ways, a tool used to accomplish tasks.