Defining CLIO Audiences
Overview
Each Program can have custom audiences groups, which are included as a way to help sort activities for predefined demographics. When setting up the kiosk as part of their pop-up exhibit, facilitators have the power to configure which activities they think would best fit their audience and what they’re trying to achieve.
As an example, this allows you to create three Slideshow activities about the same topic, but tailor each one for a different audience; one for younger learners, one for middle school children, and one for community audiences where you can expect adults are available to help explain more complex topics.
Configuring Audiences
To configure the audiences included within our Program, we must navigate to the ‘content’ folder that is located within the web application directory. Once you are in the desired Program’s directory, you should see a file named @Audiences.json. As an example, I have opened the @Audiences.json file from the ‘Default’ Program folder.
This configuration file, unlike the @About.json file, has nested objects. We have decided to keep all of these objects within one large JSON file, instead of multiple smaller JSON files, because they are all being used to define the same thing: audiences. Next to ‘object’ at the top of the window, you can see the familiar curly brackets, which show that there are three ‘keys’ directly contained within it.
Each of these top-level ’keys’ – newbie, techie, and coder – contain two ‘keys’ of their own, as you can see within the curly brackets. This is because we have nested an object within an object. The top-level newbie ‘key’ has an accompanying ‘value’, which has been defined as another nested object that contains two ‘keys’ – Name and Description – and their related ‘value’.
If we wanted to configure the ‘Default’ Program to have four audiences – children, teenagers, adults and seniors – we can change the @Audiences.json file to reflect this. First, we will want to make sure that we have four ‘keys’ defined, including the two nested ‘keys’ for each one. We already have three ‘keys’ defined, so using the JSON editor, we can ask it to duplicate a ‘key’ that we already have.
Clicking on the small square to the left of a ‘key’ will open a contextual menu. Here, you’ll see that you can add, remove and duplicate the ‘key’. When you click Duplicate, you’ll see that it creates another identical ‘key’, which already includes the two nested ‘keys’.
Now that we have four ‘keys’ created, we can start to edit the data and define what each one means. If you click on the text ‘newbie’, it will give you the option to edit the text. This is a descriptive key, so it needs to be unique within this file. When entering text in ‘keys’, avoid using spaces or special characters. Change this text to ‘child’.
While we’re here, let’s also edit the Name and Description ‘values’ that are located under ‘child’. This defines a ‘child’ audience for the computer to use when performing functions, but if it ever needs to communicate this audience to a user, the Name and Description ‘keys’ provide friendly text descriptions for humans to read.
This is how it should appear after you change the ‘values’ to your desired text. Now we just need to finish updating the rest of the keys and values to reflect the new audience structure we want to use for this Program.
This is all you need to do to update the Audiences within your program. After you’re done, you can click ‘save to disk’ from the JSON Editor Online menu bar. After it’s downloaded, you can copy it to the desired Program’s folder, overwriting the existing one.
