consumer persona - pocket note and examples

CONSUMER PERSONA – POCKET NOTE AND EXAMPLES

Persona: Sarah Windsor, Overwhelmed Faculty

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

Persona: Michael the Moderately Seasoned Professional


Persona do’s and don’ts

• 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


• 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, SME’s, 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

– 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 Berkeley’s 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-old’s 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

Pain Points

• After the IST re-org, some processes have been unclear, and he’s 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.

– 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

• 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.


consumer persona - pocket note and examples

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