Personas

Personas

These are the primary personas at my work that need to be satisfied.

SallyScientist

Sally is intelligent, technical and busy. She uses computers daily, but may not stray beyond email, the web, LabView, MatLab and her pet Fortran programs. She will not be patient with an idiosyncratic user interface, and won't take time to go through a long tutorial.

EdEmployee

Ed is the average guy who may or may not use a computer every day. He's been told to check the wiki for changes in schedules and procedures. His supervisor may ask him to update or make corrections to group wiki pages. If the wiki makes him feel stupid, he won't use it.

AliceAdministrator

Alice uses computers constantly, but mostly via M*soft applications. Any new software better behave a lot like the applications she's used to, or someone's going to hear about it. She doesn't like the idea that anyone can change anything.

ConanComputerSupport

Conan supports thousands of users. Any software that requires lots of manual tweaking is BAD. New users have to be added quickly, and old users removed quickly. He can't spend hours on the phone teaching users how to use a wiki. The software has to be robust, efficient, scalable, and supportable. Commercial support is a plus. Since his site uses lots of M*soft infrastructure, Active Directory-integration is a strong plus, and may become mandatory.

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Watch out that personas do not become stereotypes. They are intended to capture user research and insights, and should be composed so that they reveal real intentions.

See also the persona work has been done on twiki.org (personas that choose twiki as a product) in WebsitePersonas.

Would you be interested in taking part of the UserExperienceTaskTeam?

-- ArthurClemens - 26 Nov 2008 - 17:20

Actually, the above personas were meant to be relevant to my users, which is why I made it a child topic of my page. I wasn't sure if I should have put this topic in a sandbox, or make it more obvious that these weren't Foswiki-wide personas. I would be glad to take part in the UserExperienceTaskTeam. We were investigation switching from TWiki to a commercial wiki, or MediaWiki, or even SharePoint. SharePoint has lots of advantages for internal-only collaboration in M*soft-heavy environments.

-- BobBagwill - 28 Nov 2008 - 17:39

Good. Is there something particular you want to contribute on? Or having suggestions about? I assume you will be going to make switching to Sharepoint a lot harder

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Nov 2008 - 20:15

Bob: No. Sharepoint is very weak in terms of an enterprise wiki. See here "MS SharePoint als Wiki: Wenig Funktionen, nicht kompatibel" and here "How good is MS Sharepoint as a wiki?".

-- MartinSeibert - 28 Nov 2008 - 23:29