What's a better and more user friendly term than 'Audiences"

Question

If there is a segmented audience set, comprising of individuals as one segment, and various types of businesses as other segments, is there a good collective term that can be used as a top level navigation item:

Currently Audiences is the top level nav item, and the audience types are:

• Researchers (individual people)
• Universities
• Engineering companies
• Public sector organisations

Audiences feels a bit like UX jargon, and not very user friendly. Customers doesn't feel right either. Is there a better term?

Answer 1

You should run some experiments to determine which wording resonates best with your users. If there isn't an over arching word to satisfy them all then you'll have to consider breaking up your navigation.

You could a/b test the following:

audiences (control) stakeholders customers users

It's also somewhat difficult to give further suggestions without understanding the material. (ie what is the site about, where does this navigation take them).

Answer 2

Interesting problem to try solve in the general case.

I fairly frequently have an accurate, but abstract collective term that is derived from strong analysis of the domain. However as most people actually in the domain do not do the abstract analysis, and thus they would not recognise and engage with the term. Equally because the analysis is not widely done, there is no familiar term. This example appears to be a specific case of this type of issue.

Strategies I have applied when facing this issue include

• Immerse yourself in the domain with all aspects users, managers, purchase, trainers and try identify natural language to apply
• Use first good concrete term in the hierarchy- even if means more UI elements e.g. Have both "Individuals" "Organisations"
• Build a "journey UX". e.g. "If you are a [AAA][BBB][CCC]" take this route

Answer 3

You could try "Clients" if it fits the context

Answer 4

I find the the listed audiences confusing

Research for a university. Would that be research or university.

A company that is not engineering? What would that be?

Why public organization? My first thought is what is a private organization?

It seems to me mixing the entity with activity. Research to me is an activity and public versus private it entity.

Even with the current values I would go with the singular. Audience - University

Not sure of the details but that list leaves me with way to many questions.

This may not do what you want but to me the boxes are more clear

Sector:
- Academia
- Organizations
- Public Companies
- Private Companies

Activity:
- Research
- ...