Personas

Personas are a design tool developed by Alan Cooper and popularized in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Fictitious and archetypal people are created and used to guide design decisions. We developed three different personas which capture the essence of our target audience, the Knowledge Worker. The personas were derived from background data gathered from contextual inquiries as well as our personal experience in the workplace.

What is a Knowledge Worker?

For all intensive purposes, a Knowledge Worker has an occupation that deals with information generation or interpretation. They work primarily with computers but they also use wireless devices such as mobile phones or PDAs. Knowledge Workers are familiar with email and standard desktop applications. This person can run the vertical gamut in an organization from office assistant to senior manager. Another consideration is that Knowledge Workers are not always collocated with their primary team. They can work at home, travel often, work in a different city and time zone, or even be in a different part of the same office building. For these remote workers, access to the same information as the rest of the team is critical.

We used this definition of the Knowledge Worker to derive our three main personas.

Lisa Thompson

Lisa is a 32 year old project manager. She has been with the company for five years. This is her second job after graduating with an economics degree. Her work requires that she travels with some frequency and therefore uses a laptop as her primary computer. Her most advanced gadget is her cell phone which she can always be reached on.

She is known to be thoroughly organized in almost all aspects of her life. Her desk is kept neat and tidy, the folders that she uses are all color coded, she is rarely late and in the rare event a phone call of her tardiness will precede her arrival.

Lisa is known for her sensibility and practicality. This extends into many aspects of her life including the car she drives, a two year old Honda accord. Banana Republic is by far her favorite store. She has a sardonic sense of humor.

Bill Watson

Bill is a 42 year old middle manager who is currently working the marketing department. His work with the company started in the mailroom and with accounts payable prior to current work in marketing. As such, Bill knows everyone within the company and is known to be quite talkative and has been labeled a social butterfly at times.

Bill uses technology only when he has to. He reluctantly accepted email into his course of work and has discovered that he actually likes it; however, he prefers to communicate in person. Although he is notoriously horrible at responding to emails he is more than happy to answer requests in person if you can track him down. Bill keeps his tasks and priorities in his head and does not rely on organizers or office software to keep him on track. Bill is a family man. He drives a late 80’s brown diesel Mercedes.

Mike Short

Mike is your low-level IT guy. He uses email and IM ferociously. His homepage, hosted by Geocities, is mikeylikesit.com. He knows all the industry buzzwords and is able to bluff his way through many technical conversations. He is not a Linux hacker, but is more than happy to install any experimental software that includes an installer.

All attempts to use Office software to organize his life end in failure. He does however carry a PDA, but it is more for show than for organization. He has the latest cell phone with his ring-tone set to the Mission Impossible theme song. Mike drives a lowered BMW 325 with tinted windows and a performance muffler.