Personas
Overview
For this stage in the project, we used the information derived from our interviews and contextual inquiry to develop four personas – all with an eye towards the projected users as expressed by our client. The team met to discuss the key activities, motivations, attitudes and skills that would guide the creation of our personas. We arrived at a decision to develop four particular users – two types of primary users, a secondary user and a served user. According to About Face (2007), the primary users represent the main targets for interaction and the Gallery interface is a system built foremost for these personas. The secondary user is a persona who is mostly satisfied with the interface, but has additional needs which can be accomodated without disrupting usability for the primary personas. The served user is a persona who is affected by the use of the system, but in the second-order, the served persona views the end product of the interface as designed for the primary user.
Personas
- Primary Persona: John Shepperd
- Primary Persona: Jennifer Dobkin
- Secondary Persona: Simon White
- Served Persona: Diane Roberts
John Shepperd
Besides the passion of science, John has been an avid photographer and traveler since college. He loves observing his life and world through lenses. To him, photography is both a hobby and a side-project. He considers himself a semi-professional photographer who has received requests from acquaintances to be their photographer. He is always willing to take pictures for his friends when time allows. Currently he uses a Canon 40D, does 2 to 3 shoots a month during the semester and usually won’t keep the pictures on his camera too long before uploading them to computer.
Although John does not program, let alone touch a server, his interest never let him live without a computer or the web. He carries a MacBook Pro with him almost everywhere, but at home he uses a Dell desktop with a 17” screen and 500G portable drive, which serve his needs well. In addition to 6 hours on computer for work everyday, he spends another 2-3 hours just for entertainment, such as manipulating his photograms and video games.
Demographics
- 27 years old
- Avid photographer
- Languages: German and English (secondary)
Education
- 3rd year PhD in Bio-statistics in the United States
- Studied pharmaceutics as an undergraduate in Germany
Computer Proficiency
- Familiar with complex website interfaces
- Maintains his Gallery site, but does not did not set up his server
- No programing background
Goals
- To have a central place to store, organize, and manage his photography works
- To easily sharing different albums with specific people while controlling permissions for all albums
John was introduced to Gallery around 2003 by his technically savvy buddy in Germany who set up the Gallery site for him. He is happy with Gallery because he enjoys the ownership and control of all his pictures, but he also uploads some images to Flickr and Facebook. He also keeps a travel blog that uses Wordpress.
His gallery site holds around 5000 pictures, including personal work and projects for friends. It’s a pain for people like him when uploading is slow. Sometimes, he needs to adjust his photos in Photoshop before uploading them to his gallery. He thinks a handy sidebar bearing basic adjusting tools, such as contrast, brightness, saturation, or cropping, would suffice.
The friends he takes photos for come to his Gallery site to view and download the photos. He gives them accounts, but he really wants to divide his images up. Some people, even himself, prefers some photo to be exclusive, but hasn’t found an easy way to control access to his images. He also wants to have some automatic notification instead of notifying friends manually that new images are available or have been uploaded. Keeping an open web album in his plan, he is also concerned with the security of his photos and, therefore, a watermarking and backing up function would be ideal. After all, he could not afford losing almost 5000 pictures or his Gallery configuration.
At the moment, John is the maintainer of his Gallery site, but if any serious problems arise, he still depends on help from his friend who initially set up his gallery. The international communication back and forth takes a lot of time. He wishes he could stand on his own from the beginning, but it sounds like huge problem for him to restart or upgrade his Gallery site.
Lately, he is considering switching to a cool theme or maybe a new layout, which would cut down some of the lesser used links in menu bar. He found switching themes to be difficult, in addition to, Gallery not having many themes. He is willing to give it a try, but considering the time, he might just consult his friends again.
Jennifer Dobkin
Jennifer studied fashion and design at a UC school during her younger days. While she is no wizard at the computer, she is comfortable with certain software tools and she enjoys having a presence online. While at school, she had to learn the ropes for the adobe suite of graphic design tools and she created her first website, which was an online resume. She also participated for a time on a blog that was more or less a journal of her thoughts and experiences. After school, it only seemed natural that she should continue to share her times with others and so she purchased her own site domain, using it to communicate and share her life with friends and family. Now she works for a design group that specializes in bags and jewelry based in northern California.
Jennifer travels often for her job and photographs her visits to share with her friends. When she returns from a trip, she edits her travel photos with Photoshop and uploads the photos to a public album on her Gallery site. She adds brief captions to each travel photo and titles each album, with every caption comes a memory of her travels that she wants to share with others. In fact, most of her pictures don’t make it to the site. Only the best will do because while Jennifer often enjoys perusing the entire collection of old photos, the site is truly for sharing the best gems with her friends and colleagues.
Demographics
- 25 years old
- San Francisco Native
- New mother, recently married
- Language: English
Education and Occupation
- Designer for Women’s Fashion Accessories
Computer Proficiency
- Comfortable with having a web presence
- Familiar with design software
Goal
- To show off to her friends and to share with her family
She also maintains several private albums for family and friends of the family on the same site. Photos from her wedding, her pregnancy and raising her child led to the creation of these private albums which her family loves to peruse. Recently her mother gave Jennifer a massive album of photos from Jennifer’s youth. Jennifer scans the photos, edits them in photoshop and uploads them when she has time. She uploads personal photos to albums with album titles and with tags identifying people but no captions. These photos are only visible to registered family members and she is more concerned about quantity than quality here.
Jennifer has divided her site in two; there are albums for all of her friends and family that document her travels around the world and there are albums for her family only. But Jenny is glad that she can work on both in one environment, because settings for privacy are so easy to configure. Jenny treats photos sent by her family members as more of a chore, because it takes her longer to get these onto the site because she doesn’t like to scan photos. But for events like a wedding, a reunion, or her little brother’s graduation ceremony, she is quick to upload the photos to private albums.
As for her travelogues, Jenny loves to edit and upload the pictures because her friends travel as well and also share photos via email, flickr and facebook. Her friends comment on each other’s photos and Jenny is particularly proud of her collection, because her’s is different than the others; it is organized, captioned and displayed in the way she chooses. Also small things like there being no ads, like her domain name Dobkin.org and the color scheme surrounding her photo albums and notification services are part of her enthusiasm.
Simon White
Simon was born and raised near Overland Park in Kansas City, Kansas. Seeing his father work as a Staff Engineer at a local power corporation, Simon developed an early interests in mechanics and technology. These interests led him to a degree in engineering, a decade long job as a web developer, and ultimately a full-time freelance business in web development. While practicing professional web development, Simon got interested in the power of open source technologies and content management systems. Since he was interested in having a business of his own, he saw a great opportunity in utilizing free tools such as Wordpress, Joomla, Zencart, and Drupal for developing web solutions for his clients.
Simon was introduced to Gallery four and half year ago when one of his clients wanted him to develop an online photo album for a series of events at a local Jewish community. Since then he has been using Gallery for a variety of projects. Simon observes that there has been a surge in his clients demanding photo albums on their websites. Simon has used lots of advanced features in Gallery. While his overall usage experience has been satisfactory, there are a couple of problems that frustrate him and often hinder efficient execution of his growing business.
Demographics
- 38 years old Male
- Lives in Kansas City, Kansas
- Native Language English
- Holds no special interest in photography
Education and Occupation
- Holds BS in Mechanical Engineering and MS in Computer Engineering
- Works as a freelance Web Developer
- Volunteers his computer skills for community causes
Computer Proficiency
- Proficient in C++, Visual Basic, Java, HTML, CSS and SQL
- Passionate about open source tools and technologies
- Practiced professional web development for over a decade
Goal
- Provide customers best-in-class photo album service with least programming effort
Simon’s foremost complaint is that while Gallery is easy to install, it is too difficult to upgrade and maintain. He is particularly bothered when there are frequent revisions or releases (security patches) from the Gallery developer community and he has to update all of his sites separately. Because Simon’s business has been growing, maintaining more sites means spending more time for each upgrade. Further, because he is running multi-site installations, all of his sites are connected, and if there is a problem on one of the sites he has to back-up all other sites.
On related lines, Simon feels that Gallery is a great system, there is no provision for backing-up, saving photo files or configuration settings. Since Simon is using Gallery for maintaining hundreds of albums, he is literally dealing with thousands of photos at a particular point in time. He often has sleepless nights thinking if there were ever a server burn-down, his clients’ businesses, and literally his whole bread-earning capacity will be at a toss. He therefore feels that if Gallery can streamline the upgrade and back-up process, it will make his and his client’s lives a lot better.
Secondly, Simon’s clients increasingly demand interesting-looking web albums. Often times they want a special layout, look-and-feel, or menu effects. While Simon is able to satisfy some requests by using pre-existing themes (by changing colors, headers, logos, etc), many requests require him to edit SQL files and other code manipulations. In order to solve this problem, he recently wrote a theme that accepts a header and footer file, and can be used on different sites to make them look different. Simon idealizes a solution which would allow him ease and flexibility for defining what he wants for a particular site or an album and what he wants for another. He wants a way whereby he can easily define his own unique themes for different albums.
Furthermore, Simon feels that it is difficult for end-users to know what is new on the album. He wants his clients to know whenever there is a new activity on their albums. Since no such notification functionality is provided by Gallery, Simon had to write a hack that pulls information from the database every night and informs clients if anything has changed. He also thinks that if a client has different notification requirements, for example, some wish to be notified once a week while some wish to be notified for each activity, it should be easy for his clients to configure their notification rules themselves.
Finally and most importantly, Simon feels that Gallery’s help and documentation is difficult to comprehend, obscurely written, and difficult to find. He complains that locating plug-ins is so difficult because they are listed in an unorganized manner. He thinks that plug-ins should be organized according to the function they serve. For example, plug-ins that are required to enhance core functionality or code processing should be separate from the ones that help in making the interface more interesting. He also suggests that there should be a comprehensive index of all plug-ins with some description for each. Also, the search functionality should be designed to accommodate local dialects and idiom usage-if a solution has been written by a person of particular dialect, it should be made available through a neutralized comprehensive index.
Diane Roberts
Diane is a 42 year old wife and mother of three. She has two sons, a 20 year old and 17 year old, and a 15 year old daughter. She has lived in Boise, Idaho, since her and her husband got married 22 years ago. Diane completed 2 years of college before marrying her husband Peter. She is an office manager for a small medical office of two doctors. While at work, she finds herself spending a considerable amount of time on the computer, but only feels comfortable with checking email, browsing the web, and putting pictures on her computer from her digital camera.
Diane has many siblings scattered throughout California. She tries to stay connected with them as much as possible, mostly through speaking on the phone or corresponding through email. She acknowledges that staying connected and sharing experiences with family members that live other places can be difficult.
Demographics
- 42 years old
- wife and mother of three (2 sons and 1 daughter)
- Married for 22 years
- Lives in Boise, Idaho
Education and Occupation
- High School Diploma
- Completed 2 years of college
- Office manager for a medical office of 2 doctors
Computer Proficiency
- Comfortable with emailing
- Comfortable browsing the web
- Comfortable uploading images from her camera to their computer
Goals
- To stay connected with family
- Feel like she isn’t missing out on her families experiences
- Share her families experiences with other family members
Recently, Diane has found staying connected with her oldest son, Ryan, to be difficult. He is currently living in Seattle, Washington, where he has been attending the University of Washington for the past two years. Ryan is often busy with his studies and calls home about once a week for about an hour. Diane loves hearing about his week and sharing his experiences of college life and growing up. Ryan often takes pictures of places he visits or things he’s doing, such as football games, volunteer activities, and hanging out with friends. Sometimes Ryan will email pictures to Diane and his family to keep them informed of what he is doing and share his experiences. She wants to be kept up-to-date or notified of what Ryan is doing. Diane often calls her sisters in California and fills them in on how Ryan is doing. Sometimes she will forward Ryan’s pictures to her siblings to show off what he is doing because she is extremely proud of her son. Other times she prints the pictures Ryan has sent in order to easily share them with local family and friends. Diane also shares what the family has been up to with Ryan by sending him pictures of family functions, such as birthday parties. She also fills him in when they speak on the phone.
Although Diane enjoys receiving pictures from Ryan and sending him pictures, she feels that there sharing each other’s experiences through pictures could be better. She wants to be able to engage in a conversation about a particular picture with her son and other family members easily and be notified when new pictures are available. Diane doesn’t want to feel like she is missing out on her son’s or sibling’s life experiences just because they are living in different places. She thoroughly enjoys taking part in her sons experiences and is proud to share her son’s successes with her siblings. Throughout her life, connecting with family and friends has always been important and has been a valuable social support network.