CONSUMER PERSONA POCKET NOTE AND EXAMPLES

Persona: Sarah Windsor, Overwhelmed Faculty

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Persona: Michael the Moderately Seasoned Professional

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Persona dos and donts

Should:

be based on user research

be based primarily on qualitative research

be focused on users goals

be based on common behavior patterns

be specific to your design context or problem

come to life, and seem like real people

Should not:

be focused on stereotypes or generalizations

be an average of observed behavior patterns

be based only on user roles

be based only on information gathered from subject matter experts, as they cannot completely represent end users

Personas usually contain

Goals

Attitudes (related to your context)

Behaviors & Tasks (in your context)

Photo

Name

Tagline

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Demographic info

Skill level

Environment

Scenarios

Types of personas

Primary persona

A persona whose needs must be satisfied

Multiple primary personas require separate interfaces

Secondary, tertiary, etc. personas

Personas whose needs should be considered after those of the primary persona(s)

A persona is made secondary because their needs can be mostly met if the design is focused on the primary persona

Persona hypothesis

A starting point to help determine what types of users to research

Created before talking to end users

Based on information gathered from stakeholders, SMEs, your personal knowledge, and review of existing literature

Hypothesized behavior patterns

Should not be based purely on demographics

Differentiate users based on needs and behaviors

More user types can be added later if research points to other types

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Often map to roles in a non-consumer domain (e.g. education)

Can be just a rough outline/list of user goals & behavior patterns you expect to see

Primary Persona: Ernest the Engaged Employee

Work is important, but not my whole life.
Personal Information
Profession: Data Architect
Age: 43
Background: Originally from upstate New York
Education: BS in Library Science from Columbia. Is continuing his education informally, by sitting in on classes at UC Berkeleys School of
Information whenever he can. Attends industry conferences about once a year.
UCB Background: Fell into a technical position at UC Berkeley 8 years ago after working in libraries.
Home Life: Has been married for 15 years and has two children, ages 6 and 13. Their family has a pet Cockatoo. He is interesting in volunteering
some time at his 6-year-olds Montessori School in Berkeley.
Hobbies: Photography (learning Photoshop)
Personality: Efficient, detail-oriented, dedicated. Enjoys meeting new people and learning about them.
User Goals

To be as efficient as possible at work so he can spend as much quality time with his family as possible

To make more money

To continue to learn

To improve his photography & perhaps make it more of a business

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Pain Points

After the IST re-org, some processes have been unclear, and hes often had to hunt around for the right person to get things done.

Too many passwords to remember

Too many collaborative tools being used in organization

Information he needs is all over the place, not organized efficiently

Site Objectives

Help Ernest find the information he needs quickly & easily

Clarify the IST/OCIO information available instead of adding just another site to the confusion

Help Ernest learn about and connect with the IST/OCIO community

Stacy Pearson - TA Trainer/ Graduate Teaching Assistant

Characteristics

Lives in the suburbs, about 40 minutes outside the city by car, with her parents

Is a 3rd year PhD student with a specialty in Biochemistry, and has been TAing since 2004

Comes in everyday at 6:30am and spends all day on campus until around 5pm. She does most of the work on campus, in the lab and in
her office, and none at home.

She coordinates the TA training program where she trains TAs through the office of Teaching Advancement. With other coordinators,
she organizes workshops for TAs on how to teach students.

She uses Blackboard as a TA but is not a huge fan. She only login when she gets an email notification with important announcements.

She uses a highly paper-based file organization system. She prints out course materials and organizes them into binders in
chronological order.

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If she needs to take files home, she emails her files to her Yahoo account.

Goals

Get her PhD

Become a better teacher

"I'm all manual. Papers, folders, and binders.

Main Points:
Uses physical folders, binders, and drawers to organize her reading materials
Teaches TAs how to teach students
Concerned about Mac-PC compatibility when transferring files
Frustrated that she doesn't have access to the LMS her students are using
ADDITIONAL INFO IN THIS PERSONA

Did her undergrad at the University of Waterloo, and 3 years at the University of Toronto

* Her home computer is a PC, which she only uses for checking emails. She mostly uses her iMac in her lab and occasionally uses the iBook in her
office that her department gave her a few years ago. Even though it is a laptop, she finds it heavy to carry around and just leaves it in the office. She
is on her Mac machines, and the other TAs she works with are not, so she is always concerned about compatibility when they share documents such
as PowerPoint slides, Excel sheets with grades, and Word documents.

Supports two departments, Biochemistry and Dentistry. For the lab course for the Dentistry department, she writes Quizzes and marks them.
Quizzes are specific to each experiment, so every TA has to prepare his/her own questions. She also prepares forms for students to fill in lab
results and the lab itself. Her students print out the lab instructions from their LMS, but she doesn't have access to it. This causes problem
sometimes of her walking into the lab with different lab instructions than the students. She thinks it would help if she could log into the
students' LMS.

She also marks the presentations students give as part of their lab course

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She coordinates the TA training program where she trains TAs through the office of Teaching Advancement. With other coordinators, she
organizes workshops for TAs on how to teach students. The latest workshop was on Problem Based Learning and Self-Directed Learning. For
this program, she sometimes gives written sessions on Blackboard.

The coordinators of the TA training program go to all departments every September to find out what they want their TAs to be trained in. They
customize the training slides for each department. The training workshops varies in sizes, from 6 to 100, but typically they get about 40 TAs
in a class. The program covers materials from the TA Handbook, how to grade

* She uses a highly paper-based file organization system. She prints out course materials and organizes them into binders in chronological order.
What normally happens is she'll print out the lecture notes for the upcoming lecture, carry it around in her "Today" folder, because it's lighter that
way, take notes in them, then put them in the binder after the lecture. If she hasn't had time to read the notes, she'll put the notes in the binder without
punching holes, so they stick out. This is her flagging system, reminding herself to read it later.
* She also digitally organizes her files into folders on the desktop. She has a folder for the "old crap," where she dumps all the old folders and files.
When she needs to find an old file, she uses the OSX finder "Search" capability.
* She tends to use Email to communicate with students. She uses her Yahoo account for this, because it's easier to organize contacts and do mass
mailings there. She groups students by section and year, and sends emails out to the group and cc's her boss. Yahoo lets you create groups of contact,
so when you send, you can select the group rather than typing up each student's email. In her LMS, she can send an email to multiple people, but she
needs to copy and paste all of those email addresses.
* Each of the departments she works with has their own LMS. As a TA supporting multiple departments, she finds this very cumbersome and
would like one integrated LMS.

Complied by: Sohan Babu Khatri, CEO, Three H Management

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