Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas helps the designer to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. - Interaction Design
Personas should be created based on observations and data collection about people. This is just a very rough draft.
This page is a work in progress.
Things to know about our personas
- Motivations
- Goals
- Frustrations
- Data types
- Environment in which they operate
- Data restrictions
- Skills
- Access
Example persona
Academic researcher
Motivation
I have research questions I want to answer and have been gathering data related to those topics, have access to data or am getting it from online resources. I need to analyze this data, be able to share and reproduce results. I need to try out different workflows and approaches as a part of my work. I have some domain specific types of data analysis that I need to do. I want to focus on my research and not have to spend too much time figuring out my tooling. I also need to teach students in the classroom or people in my lab about data analysis and good practices.
Goals
- Analyze my research data
- Share results
- Be able to reproduce results and document methods
- Work with collaborators and students
- Teaching data skills in the classroom
- Use tools that ‘just work’
Frustrations
- Spending a lot of time on installation
- Spending a lot of time ‘learing coding’
- Spending a lot of time developing materials to teach data skills
- Tools that people use aren’t well documented
- Things change and hard to stay current
- ‘Best practices’ for coding / data science / reproducibility not clear
- Not clear what things to learn to ‘level up’
Data types
There are many different data types in academic research. A few - Tabular data (a lot of this) - Text data - Image data - Genomic data - Data from scientific instruments
Someone working with Very Large Data, like for instance astronomy data, might be its own persona.
Environment
University or college with not a lot of money or resources for software. May have access to high performance computing resources, but might not know how to use them. Need to use things for themselves, and also be tools that other people can use. There are probably not restrictions on the tools people can choose to use and computers aren’t ‘locked down’.
Data restrictions
May have some Personally Identifiable Information. HIPPA data should probably be its own persona.
Skills
This will vary, but mainly people are self-taught. So, they are learning to use the tools, but probably didn’t take courses in data sciance or computer science. May have done some coding in a statistics class.
Within this person we should maybe have a ‘getting started’ and a ‘coding for awhile’ version.
Access
Likely have a reasonably good computer and access to the internet. This will vary though. Perhaps limited access is another version of this persona.