Personas

ACS Developer Central : ACS Home : User-Centered Design : Personas

maintained by Lars Pind.


This is stable. (updated June 22, 2001)

Overview and Org Chart

Personas Org Chart and Overview
(open in new window)

High-Level

Persona Goals Job Description Interaction
Chris Rothschild
Chris Rothschild
Tax Lawyer
  • Learning about photography and equipment.
  • Investing in the right equipment.
  • Improving collaboration in his law firm.
Helping clients manage their taxes, managing his staff.
  • Sign up for account, change password, etc.: Regular account management.
  • Buy photo products, read articles.
  • Research products via reviews and product comparisons.
  • Participate in community.
  • Install and maintain an ACS installation for collaboration internally in his tax law company.
  • Intranet/Collaboration (very broad).
Karen Gross
Karen Gross
Web Master
  • Make sure all the product information, articles and all other content on the site is current, appropriate and correct.
  • Ensure that visitors can find the content they're interested in on the site, and don't experience any errors or other problems.
Editing, reviewing and publishing content and its presentation, information architecture for the site.
  • Design and oversee publishing process; assign, edit, and publish articles and all other site content.
  • Design and maintain site architecture and content categories.
  • Promote content to user classes.
  • Administer access control for employees and moderators.
Steve Danley
Steve Delaney Photographer, Author
  • Make sure the site visitors will continue to learn as much as possible.
  • Engage the visitors in the community, that is, discussions about photography, articles and products.
  • Learn about new products by reviewing them and about photography from experts in the community.
Writing articles on photography, attracting and involving the community, finding products to review and feature on site.
  • Submit articles and product reviews.
  • Moderate and answer questions on bboard.
  • Contribute photos to the gallery, and select them for use in articles and on the site in general.
Annette Chang
Annette Chang
Graphic Designer, Content Developer
  • Make the site look like something from the 21st century
  • Make sure all the copy is correct.
Do graphic design on the site, produce the templates, copywriting product information.
  • Upload templates and verify how they look in combination on actual pages.
  • Write and update catalog information (product descriptions, images, etc.).
Stanley Jones
Stanley Jones
Web Developer
  • Make sure the technical side of the site runs smoothly at all times: No disks fill up, no bugs encountered by users, no known security holes, etc.
  • Provide new, cool, interactive community features to users.
Install and maintain the site, add site-specific functionality not provided by the ACS.
  • Install the software.
  • Install libraries/modules/packages.
  • Find known and potential errors and problems.
  • Configure server environment & parameters.
  • Archive and backup important site data.
  • Read API and component documentation.
Betty White
Betty White
Editor
  • Show off her style skills
  • Make sure her content is effective and looks good
  • Feel like she's accomplished something
Edit the articles, product reviews, and other content, to ensure consistency of style, quality, and factuality.
  • Edit articles, product reviews, etc.

More Details

Chris Rothschild  
Chris Rothschild
Occupation: Lawyer Age: 40 Technology: Early Majority
Quote:New toys! Ahh!

Chris is a 40-year old tax lawyer with a crush on photography. He's been taking pictures semi-seriously since he was 25, but since he got into the tax law business, his equipment spending has surged somewhat, while the amount of time he can devote to photography has plunged.

He likes JoesPhoto.com for their personality. He feels like he knows Steve from the articles and discussions, and Chris is grateful to him for all the things that he's learned while being a part of the community. Joe's Photo also have pretty good, reliable product info, links to their own and others' reviews, product comparisons, etc., and he appreciates that a lot: Though he does make money now, he doesn't want to squander it on second-rate equipment, and he doesn't have time to do too much research himself. He knows that their prices are generally reasonable, so he doesn't get screwed, and he loves the free overnight shipping. He has a small set of things that he buys regularly, such as film and storage sleeves.

He doesn't know a whole lot about computers, but he can generally read a manual and make things work, as he recently did with his Cablevision cable modem at home. And when he does get stuck, he knows who to call. He really likes the community features of JoesPhoto.com, so he asked in a discussion forum there what software they were using to run the site. Stanley pointed him in the right direction, and Chris managed to set up a ACS5 installation on a fresh VA Linux box for his office, that him and his 10 colleagues now use for collaboration. Apart from ACS5, they're using Windows NT, Office 2000 and Internet Explorer.

Chris is married and has two daughters at 6 and 4. He commutes between his house in Westchester and the Midtown law firm every day in his dark blue, 3 year old BMW 535.

Karen Gross  
Karen Gross
Occupation: Web Master Age: 28 Technology: Early Majority
Quote: Stanley, I need this today! Please...?

Karen owns the content on the site. And when she says owns, she means it. She's a perfectionist, always immaculately dressed, and she takes pride in making sure no typos, no incorrect information, and no bugs or other glitches ever find their way into her pages. When they do, she rallies the troops to get them fixed immediately.

Karen has managed web content for about 3 years, but joined Joe's Photo about four months ago. She is a workaholic and a micro-manager that likes to keep a close eye on the status of all portions of the site and in production. Karen has previously worked in Corporate Communications and pays close attention to the image that the Web site presents. She doesn't do any programming, but knows HTML and has dabbled a little in graphic design for the fun of it. She is very specific in what she wants, and she works closely with the template designer. Karen enjoys knowing the site looks and works perfectly. She is always looking for ways to improve it and wants immediate notification when things need changing.

She always takes time to workout every evening, her favorite are the spinning classes on Thursday nights. She lives in an apartment in Soho with her cat and her boyfriend, whom she's been seeing for a year now.

Steve Delaney  
Steve Delaney
Occupation: Photographer and Author Age: 41 Technology: Laggard
Quote: Did I tell you about when I took that picture of the two bears mating?

Steve is a 41 year-old nature photographer who gained notoriety by writing articles and editorials for photography magazines. Joe's Photo hired him to write for the site and to get the community going. Most of the photos, articles and equipment reviews on the site are his, and he takes pride in answering questions from his readers.

While he gets completely carried away with photography itself, Steve is something of a conservative when it comes to technology. He's happy with his trusted friend, the Nikon F2, and is skeptic of high tech gee wiz auto-everything cameras. He is just now supplementing with an F4, and is even experimenting with a D1, as he can no longer deny the advantages.

As far as computers go, he mostly hates them. He's gotten the gnack of rebooting his Powerbook when something goes wrong. As part of his job, he had people come and set up DSL at his house. He finds web browsing to be much more useful now, although he still sometimes gets frustrated when he can't find any genuinely new and stimulating content He has learned MS Word 98 enough to open it, type, and save. He leaves formatting and editing to others.

He travels all over the globe to get the best shots possible, and he writes articles about his experiences. He'll send his articles and photos using whatever internet connection he can get, and he hates it, but if he didn't do it, he wouldn't get his expenses taken care of.

He's married, has two kids from his first marriage, and drives an old, beat-up, brown Jeep CJ7. Sports? Hell no!

Annette Chang  
Annette Chang
Occupation: Graphic Designer/Content Developer Age: 25 Technology: Early Adopter
Quote: Can't we make that design a little tighter?

Annette has been a graphic designer for a couple years years, since she graduated from the School of Visual Arts. She digs a minimalist style, when she designs, when she dresses, and when she talks. She's been with JoesPhoto.com for about a year now, and does all their graphic design.

She's a wizard with Photoshop 6.0 and Golive 5.0 on her Mac G3 with a 22" Apple Cinema Studio display. That said, that's pretty much all that she really feels comfortable with, when it comes to software, and she hates it when computers make her feel stupid.

Since there isn't really that much graphic design work to do all the time, and with the job market being so sluggish and all, Pamela, the Head Honcho, has convinced her to take on responsibility for content development, code word for copy writing. It's not really her favorite kind of work, but it pays the rent, and there's a certain satisfaction in doing some braindead work when her creative self has taken a vacation.

When she gets fed up with copywriting, she helps out with interior design on her girlfriend's hip lower east side bar. She rides the subway to work from her cool Williamsburg loft, which she shares with a couple friends from school.

Stanley Jones  
Stanley Jones
Occupation: Web Developer Age: 24 Technology: Innovator
Quote: Yeah, this web-thing is kinda fun.

Stanley's a laid-back, 24-year old web developer who graduated two years ago from UMich with a degree in CS. Stanley's best time on the job is when he solves a tough problem with his friends and stays up all night implementing it. After an all-nighter Stanley and his friends love to head down to Ray's Famous Pizza #13 and grab a couple of slices each.

He's a bright kid that doesn't need much by way of motivation, but his ambitions aren't up in the sky. He likes the low-key kind of job he has, staying close to the users of the site, finding ways to make their interactions more meaningful and entertaining. He likes taking photos with his digital camera, and enjoys learning from Steve and the community.

He uses Linux, Emacs and CVS for everything that he can, and is annoyed when Heidi or Steve make him use Word or Excel. His software architecture skills aren't a whole lot to brag about, but he doesn't really care. He can make a site run, pretty much all by himself, and that's nothing to be ashamed of. He's not exactly an Oracle DBA or a sysadmin wiz, but he can fix problems when he needs to, and he knows who and what to ask when he gets stuck.

He recently got a Nomad Jukebox MP3 player with 6 GB disk space, and though he's upset about the shut-down of Napster, he's happily chugging away on Gnutella. He lives in an apartment near Prospect Park in Brooklyn with his friend from college. He doesn't need a car: He has a MetroCard.

Betty White  
Betty White
Occupation: Editor Age: 48 Technology: Laggard
Quote: 20 years ago, people could really write!

Betty has a lot of experience with language. On a good day, when she's on vacation, she'll finish several novels in a single day. And she'll remember almost every single word, too. Betty just has a thing with words.

She lives with her husband and two kids in a house in Greatneck. Her job isn't what she'd really like to be doing. She'd prefer a job at a literature publisher somewhere, but the competition is so fierce. And there is a certain pleasure in learning about photography.

She doesn't particularly like computers, but she doesn't hate them, either. She's gotten used to use Word, and Karen has made her learn how to use exactly three different HTML tags, and that's about it. When there's something she can't figure out how to do, she either forgets about it or asks someone who knows.


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