Another Audience to Consider:
Identifying ages as significant user groups

Lately, we've been reminded repeatedly that as we write and illustrate our documents we must be aware of the cultural differences of our various lingual audiences. For example, never use symbols of the hand or fingers in your documents, like the warning 'hand' or the reminder 'finger' as that may offend audiences of some Mediterranean countries.

But what defines culture? Political borders, language, religion, and traditions are typically identified as factors that distinguish one culture from another, but have we considered age in our work?

A Wider Range of Ages

Age groups have become a distinctive audience of our products and documents. Due to the widespread development, accessibility, and affordability of digital consumer products — including mobile phones, music players, game systems — our once-narrow audiences have expanded considerably.

Since a six-year-old child or a ninety-six-year-old adult both are users of a cell phone, we shouldn't forget to internationalize or localize such products for multiple ages, not just languages. Using visual images and symbols as the foundation, we must recognize how different age groups interpret them.

Symbols for Televisions

For example, as technical communicators, what symbol would we use to denote a television? Maybe I'm aging myself here, but most of would think of a monitor with two channel knobs and some rabbit-ears on top. Would an 8-year old know what this is? Would a 10-year old? Even a 16-year old? If we simplified it to look like our standard TVs today, would that make it better? Likely not, as we have far too many appliances that look the same: microwave ovens, computer monitors, and so on. Surprisingly, to internationalize this image for most ages and countries, placing the letters TV inside this minimalistic TV set would work best, even if your native tongue's word for TV is something else.

Symbols for Telephones

Aside from the TV symbol, what would we use to represent the telephone? Similar to the traditional TV, the telephone has come a long way in shape, size, and complexity. Not all children, even teenagers, would immediately recognize the first two telephone symbols above. As tweens and teenagers become the next generation of big-spending consumers, we must acknowledge that their interpretation of symbols is quite different than our own. The cell phone depicted above may be the newest symbolic standard for 'telephone' for most ages and most countries around the world, even developing nations, who have better cellular telephone infrastructure and penetration than we do!

Lifespans of Symbols

But how long will that symbol last? The traditional table-top rotary-dial telephone depicted above has been around for much of the 20^th century. Will the hand-held cell-phone symbol last for the 21^st century? As our users and customers age, so too do our visual images. As technology advances and consumers adopt new products, the symbolic and visual conventions that we use to instruct and inform must advance as well.

About Patrick Hofmann

Patrick is an Interaction Designer at Quarry Integrated Communications
in Waterloo. Although he's a rather vibrant speaker, his specialty is using illustration and visual language to communicate. When he's not trotting around the globe teaching the virtues of visual instruction and design, he conducts a 15-piece Swiss polka band in rural Milverton, Ontario. Who says tech-comm and trumpets don't mix?

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