# Audience AI Skill Define Area · Audience Block · Decision Map --- ## 1. What the Skill Does The Audience skill helps teams understand who their signals come from before they start testing or building. It works inside the Define area of Glare's Decision Map. This is where teams decide whose feedback counts, how much weight to give it, and how to describe users in a way that makes testing possible. Without a clear audience, customer data, stakeholder opinion, and personal preference all get treated equally. When that happens, metrics lose meaning and teams end up solving the wrong problem. The skill organizes audience into four voices. Each voice plays a different role in the design process. | Audience | Provides | Signal Weight | |---|---|---| | Project Team | Intent — what the team thinks will work | Light but continuous | | Stakeholders | Direction — what matters most to the business | Medium to high | | Customers | Proof — how the product works in real life | Highest | | Participants | Clarity — how the design feels before release | High during testing | Internal voices guide. External voices validate. Customers confirm what works. Participants predict what will. **Audience-Build Rule** Teams often jump straight to user testing without aligning internally first. That leads to misaligned results — the team interprets findings differently because they never agreed on what they were trying to learn. The rule is simple: build your audience in order. Project Teams form intent first. Stakeholders align on business impact next. Participants validate direction during testing. Customers confirm outcomes last. Skipping a step upstream shows up as confusion downstream. --- ## 2. Business Benefit A clear audience helps teams collect the right signals from the right people. Without it, feedback piles up without direction and decisions stall. This helps teams: - stop treating all feedback as equally important - connect user signals to business goals - test with the right people at the right time - avoid building for users who don't exist - make decisions that hold up in stakeholder reviews Research becomes faster to run and easier to act on. --- ## 3. Skill Output When used correctly, the skill creates a clear audience brief for a product or workflow. The brief shows: - which of the four voices matter most for this decision - how to describe users by what they do, not just who they are - which customer lifecycle segment to focus on - which participant type to recruit for testing - how to weight signals from each voice The example below shows how this works for a mobile banking dashboard. | Field | Example Output (Mobile Banking Dashboard) | |---|---| | Primary Voice | Customers — Habitual Users (log in 3+ times per week to check balance and transactions) | | Secondary Voice | Stakeholders — Product team (focused on retention and session depth) | | Participant Type | Adjacent Users — people who use other financial apps but not this one yet | | Key Attributes | Behavioral (login frequency), Lifecycle (habitual vs. new paying), Contextual (mobile-only vs. cross-device) | | Signal Weight | Customer behavior carries highest weight. Participant feedback guides direction during testing. | | Failure Mode to Watch | Over-relying on participant feedback and skipping customer behavior data — confident in theory, fragile in practice. | | Next Step Handoff | → glare-define-collecting to choose the right research methods for each audience voice | The output connects directly to the other Define blocks: - User Needs helps name what each audience is trying to accomplish - Collecting helps choose the right methods for each voice - UX Metrics helps pick the right numbers to track per segment --- ## 4. Prompt Strategies The prompts below show different ways to use this skill. Each example uses a mobile banking dashboard update. --- ### Prompt 1 — Diagnostic Entry: Start from a feedback problem "We're updating our mobile banking dashboard and our team keeps getting conflicting feedback. Designers think users want more data on the home screen. The product team thinks users want fewer taps to reach key actions. Using the glare-define-audience skill, walk the four audience voices in order and help us figure out whose feedback to prioritize and how to weight each voice for this decision." **Why this works:** Conflicting feedback is almost always an audience problem. This prompt uses the four-voice frame to separate internal opinion from external proof, and gives the team a way to resolve disagreement without more meetings. **Best for:** - resolving feedback conflicts between teams - sprint planning where priorities are unclear - any decision where internal opinion is being treated as user data --- ### Prompt 2 — Targeting Entry: Define who to test with "We need to run usability testing on our mobile banking dashboard redesign. We're not sure who to recruit. Using glare-define-audience, help us identify the right participant type for this phase of testing, choose 3–5 attributes to describe them, and explain which customer lifecycle segment we should validate against once testing is complete." **Why this works:** Most teams recruit participants too broadly or describe them by job title instead of behavior. This prompt uses the attribute framework to build a testable group and connects participant testing to the right customer segment for follow-up validation. **Best for:** - planning a usability study - writing a participant screener - connecting research to a specific customer segment --- ### Prompt 3 — Stakeholder Entry: Translate findings for a business audience "We have usability findings from our mobile banking dashboard testing. Completion rate on the transaction history flow dropped to 61%. We need to present this to our product and finance stakeholders. Using glare-define-audience, help us translate this finding into the language each stakeholder group cares about, and identify which business workflow each signal connects to." **Why this works:** Design findings often get dismissed because they are presented in design language. This prompt uses the stakeholder workflow map to reframe the same data in terms of retention, risk, and revenue — the metrics each audience already tracks. **Best for:** - preparing a leadership readout - getting buy-in for a redesign - translating UX data into business impact --- *Glare Framework · glare-define-audience · Define Area* *Handoffs: glare-define-user-needs · glare-define-collecting · glare-define-ux-metrics · glare-design-signals*