Transcript Persona - lcraigwilson.com

INTRODUCTION OF
USER PERSONAS TO
SUNRISE ENGINEERING
Using Personas to
Drive Design &
Improve User Experience
IxD / UI / UX Human Factors Engineer
Craig Wilson
For Avocent / LANDesk
Sept 2008
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What is a Persona?
A Persona is …
…a user profile of the archetypical customer.
…a fictional person based on real customer data who
represents a segment of real users or system
participants.
…a resemblance of several people interviewed but
does not exactly match any one of them.
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Why Personas?
When engaged in the design process, many
questions can come up:
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What features should be included?
What is the commonality in our user base?
Who are we building for, and what do they need?
How do we avoid building features for just one
user?
• How do we prioritize our features?
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Enter the Persona
Personas help us:
• Focus on and obsess about our customers’ needs.
• Understand and differentiate between our users’
experiences to build customer loyalty.
• Answer questions that come up through the creation
process. They build confidence, clarity, and continuity
of strategy.
• Remove the phrase “I think” from discussions about
what the users need.
This focused design enables our users to
understand our applications without hesitation.
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How Personas Help in the Design Process
• Personas identify new opportunities. When we
understand the personas’ needs, we can design
solutions to solve the customers needs.
• Support business-critical user goals. Personas provide
a detailed understanding of user goals, their intents,
and work practices. What’s critical to them—and how
can we help them accomplish it.
• Prioritization. Understanding customers’ goals and
behaviors can allow us to explicitly quantify the value
of each persona to the business. This allows us to
prioritize based on the most critical needs.
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Product Planning
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Where do Personas fit in?
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Meet Our Personas
Lance Miller – LINUX-UNIX+ SYS ADMIN INFRASTRUCTURE
KEY MOTIVATORS AND GOALS
“I prefer to use the command line.
SSH is the main tool I use at work.
I don’t like to wait for a browser
to load for Administrative tasks.
When I do use a browser I use
Firefox because I pretty much
consider Microsoft the ‘Great
Satan’ and I avoid using Windows
products at all costs.”
A PERFECT DAY FOR LANCE:
On a perfect day all of Lance’s systems are working smoothly,
this means none of his system management software or
scripts are showing any warnings or alerts. None of his users
are calling with access issues, and he can complete his daily
task list of reviewing logs and issues in one to two hours.
These days are so few and far between the last one was...?
• Keep the servers up. Lance is
proud of his system “uptime”
and his bonus is based in part
on server availability.
• Solve it quickly and reliably.
Lance doesn’t want to waste
time loading a browser to access
a remote server. CLI and SSH
are his tools of choice.
• Be the answer man. Lance
enjoys being recognized by his
peers for code that he has
written and has been integrated
into other open source
applications.
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Meet Our Personas
Lance Miller – LINUX-UNIX+ SYS ADMIN INFRASTRUCTURE
LANCE’S STORY:
Lance is a Linux Geek. He became proficient in Unix in college, and then
moved on to explore Linux after he graduated with his Computer Science
degree in 1995. He has Linux servers on his personal network at home, and
he prefers to use it at the office. He considers Windows slow and unreliable.
He has been the Sys Admin in the data center for an import/export business
for 5 years. He aspires to move into the network manager role at work, and
currently reports to the data center manager. His responsibilities include the
installation and maintenance of the OS and applications on company servers.
He is always looking for quick-and-dirty ways to get his work done—
sometimes by developing home grown applications using Perl, PHP, Python,
JAVA, C, C++ and MySQL. He also works with many different open source
applications.
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When things are slow at the office, Lance likes to stay on top of new
technology. He reads Linux Magazine, Linux Journal and SysAdmin Magazines.
He often reads InfoWorld and SlashDot through RSS feeds online. When he’s
not at work, he likes writing open source apps and taking his wife and kids
camping.
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Lance Miller – LINUX-UNIX+ SYS ADMIN INFRASTRUCTURE
FROM THE DESK OF LANCE MILLER
HOW THIS AVOCENT PRODUCT BENEFITS LANCE:
Lance is a target user of the ACS product line (and
would be interested in serial access provided by
other products) for the following reasons:
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He prefers to work from a CLI on his client
machine as well as on the equipment he uses
and servers he manages.
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He utilizes serial based CLI commands for his
day to day requirements.
He uses SSH to gain access to remote servers.
He is really interested in a lot of the advanced
features that are available through the ACS
product.
He likes the batch configuration tool (configACS)
for scripting configurations for appliance and
target device configuration.
He uses Power management in situations where
a remote power cycle is required.
To do list:
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Monitor the health of servers and applications for
availability and functionality
Ensure that system monitoring tools are operating
optimally
Write and use scripts to check the logs for specific events
Coordinate user access control into the Unix/Linux
environments of the data center
Facilitate and monitor backups of systems and restoration
as required
Use SSH to manage applications and servers from the OS
command line as required
Use NetClarity and Qualys to monitor the security and
vulnerability of systems
Receive RSS feeds on issues and patches for Linux and
any applications in use
Respond to issues found by the monitoring tool or
information received to patch systems
Utilize syslog to monitor of all of the infrastructure
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Meet Our Personas
Lloyd Ball– LAB MANAGER AND ADMINISTRATOR
KEY MOTIVATORS AND GOALS
“My test lab is a dynamic
environment, I have to
react quickly and be flexible
to do whatever is necessary
to get product delivered on
time.”
A PERFECT DAY FOR LLOYD:
On a perfect day Lloyd spends his time successfully deploying
development and test environments and responding to tickets
opened by his customers. He continually identifies unused assets
so that they can be retired or redeployed. When he’s not serving
customers, he plans for future project deployments and
implementing policy and processes to improve operations. Lloyd
caters to local and remote users (including offshore), and he must
provide as much remote control and autonomy as possible to his
customers (developers and testers) as possible.
•Stay organized. Lloyd needs to
know what assets are available for
his users.
• Be fast, flexible, and deliver
on time. Lloyd receives a small
quarterly bonus based on
customer satisfaction feedback.
• Plan for growth. Lloyd needs
to
ensure the lab can support the
companies growing needs.
• Save the company money.
Lloyd is compensated for finding
ways to reuse company assets,
and for optimizing processes.
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Meet Our Personas
Lloyd Ball– LAB MANAGER AND ADMINISTRATOR
LLOYD’S STORY:
Lloyd is a test lab manager for a software engineering firm. His company made him
a good offer based on his previous work experience and his high grades in college.
He graduated with his engineering degree in 1998. Lloyd reports to the engineering
department—not the IT department. This gives him a certain amount of freedom in
his job. As long as his customers are happy, he can pretty much do as he likes.
Lloyd checks the calendar on his PDA often to keep up with his schedule. He is
responsible for the entire test lab infrastructure—not only the servers, but also
network, storage and OS/image deployment. Lloyd deals with the complete lifecycle
of assets from acquisition to retirement and is responsible for capacity management
within the lab. Lloyd is not responsible for applications, as his customers usually
take care of that themselves.
The tools he uses on a day-to-day basis include his home grown asset database,
Ghost for imaging servers, and a network monitoring tool.
If he can, Lloyd sets up virtual machines for his users. This allows his customers to
share servers and to keep his footprint from growing every time a new project starts.
Lloyd dislikes travel and works remotely to avoid it. When he’s not at work he enjoys
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Meet Our Personas
Lloyd Ball– LAB MANAGER AND ADMINISTRATOR
WHAT CAN AVOCENT DO FOR LLOYD:
• Lloyd uses many different types of hardware
and appliances in the lab. He needs one
application that allows him to access and
control everything. Avocent can provide:
• Multi-role access to shared consoles.
• Discover y for new equipment that’s
connected in the lab.
• Reports to check the status of the lab
equipment
• Management for virtual servers.
• Power management in situations where a
remote power cycle is required.
FROM THE DESK OF Lloyd Ball
Today’s to do list:
•Provision new test environments
•Decommission old test environments
•Perform capacity assessment
•Evaluate new products
•Improve operational efficiency
•Report status
•Test new tools, production processes and equipment
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Meet Our Personas
Nick Nimitz – NETWORK & SECURITY ADMIN
“My preferred user interface is
certainly the CLI. I do
occasionally use other GUI’s for
reports and other tasks, but I
prefer CLI because it allows me to
script common tasks and link or
integrate them into other tools.”
A PERFECT DAY FOR NICK:
A perfect day for Nick consists of a day without any network or
WAN outages. It doesn’t take long for him to review his daily logs.
If there are no external attacks or hacking attempts, he spends
time researching new products and technologies, or mentoring his
team members. On a good day he spends time with network
reporting tools to better understand the network characteristics and
how to improve performance. (continued)
KEY MOTIVATORS AND GOALS
• Keep the environment secure.
Nick is proud of his teams response
time to any security problems. He also
gets a bonus if no money has to be
spent on intrusion recovery.
• Be a hotshot. Nick is driven by his
ego. He feeds his ego by mentoring his
coworkers and showing off his
knowledge of the latest security trends.
• Prevent outages. Detect and resolve
any network issues before customers
are affected.
• Plan for growth. Nick wants all of his
infrastructure solutions to be for the
long term.
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Meet Our Personas
Nick Nimitz – NETWORK & SECURITY ADMIN
A PERFECT DAY FOR NICK:
(continued from the previous page)
Nick stays current on what is going
on in the industry. He scans/reads
Network World, Network
Computing, Information Week and
Communication News. He also
reads techrepublic.com and the
online Network World site (used to
be NWFusion). He subscribes to
several newsletters from Network
World and Network Computing
writers as well as some industry
writers. He also has time to review
hacking web sites to stay up to date
on hackers are attacking networks.
To do:
FROM THE DESK OF NICK NIMITZ
Use monitoring tools such as “What’s Up Gold” to monitor all networks, network interfaces as
well as VPNs.
Make sure everything is up and running for both internal and remote locations.
Respond to any security alerts and warnings.
Check security logs for any issues.
Review network traffic and usage to identify possible degraded performance and take corrective
actions if necessary.
Keep the network infrastructure current with patches and OS upgrades.
Manage changes in the network topology and routing configuration.
Generate and review network usage reports and recommend changes as necessary.
Include validating WAN bandwidths to remote locations and adjusting those as necessary.
Respond to any security flashes to protect the network from any worms, viruses or other attacks
as they occur from the public network.
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Meet Our Personas
Will Foster– WINDOWS® SYS ADMIN JR LEVEL
“My main priority is to keep
things running so that my
customers don’t have a reason
to complain.”
Will's STORY:
Will was hired to do desktop support
for a small IT shop while still attending
community college. The employer was
flexible during the day to meet Will’s class schedule and in return Will
was often on-call late at night and on weekends.
Will has several Microsoft certificates. He uses mostly GUI-based
Microsoft tools to get his job done. Some of his responsibilities include
installation and desktop support for Windows OS and applications. He
was promoted a few months ago to Windows system administrator, so
now he reports to the data center manager. His job is very hands-on
with a lot of on-the-job training. He is also working on his CCNA
certification to qualify for a promotion to Network Manager.
KEY MOTIVATORS AND GOALS
• Server availability. Will
focuses on supporting his SLA’s
and aims to keep his customers
happy.
• Be connected. Will needs
remote access to manage
servers around the clock.
•Troubleshoot the problem
quickly. When a server is in
trouble, Will is on the hot seat to
get it up and healthy quickly.
• Upward mobility. Will is
learning the tools of the trade to
qualify for a Network Manager
position.
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Meet Our Personas
Will Foster– WINDOWS® SYS ADMIN JR LEVEL
WILL'S STORY:
At home, Will and his roommate have several networked machines which get a lot
of use playing multi-player online games (MMO’s). They have wireless capabilities
on both stories of their townhouse apartment. His office pays the tab for their
broadband connection so he can access the office network over the VPN 24/7. The
downside to that is he gets 3 a.m. phone calls about downed servers—which is one
of Will's biggest pet peeves.
Will's typical workday involves scanning his e-mail to check on news about patches and vulnerabilities as well as
responding to customer requests (complaints mostly). He spends a good chunk of his day reacting to server
incidents. His customers are internal to the business so he hears quickly from them if there are any outages. His
in-band tool of choice is RDP. He deals with some infrastructure such as Active Directory or Exchange servers.
He spends a lot of time on the Windows support site at Microsoft.com. They are moving more servers to
VMWare as it allows them greater flexibility and cost savings in allocating the server hardware.
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When he has time, he tests Microsoft patches (which MS sends out in bulk the second week of the month) in
the lab before pushing these updates to his servers. He has downloaded Vista and Server 2007 plays with it in
the lab. He’s not eager to send it live. He also reads TechNet, Network World, and Network Computing
Magazines. When he has spare time, he writes a blog about online gaming.
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Meet Our Personas
Will Foster– WINDOWS® SYS ADMIN JR LEVEL
HOW THIS AVOCENT PRODUCT
BENEFITS Will:
• Will utilizes graphical-based tools for
his work.
• Will uses the DSR product line.
• Will uses DSView® 3 Management
Software to access and manage his
servers.
• Will needs this access to reboot
systems and access the BIOS settings
of his servers.
• He has to recover when the servers
stop responding or display the “Blue
Screen of Death.”
• When performing maintenance Will
also needs local access to servers in
the rack.
• He uses Power management when a
remote power cycle is required.
FROM THE DESK OF Lloyd Ball
To do:
•Monitor the health of 30 servers and applications for availability and
functionality Manually review system logs, system status (disk space,
etc.).
•Use “What’s Up Gold” for some basic monitoring.
•Manage user access and passwords via Active Directory.
•Facilitate and monitor backups of systems, and any restoration as
needed.
•Use RDP for some tasks use KVM over IP to install software.
•Respond to any technical support issues (serves as a Level 3 escalation
point) for users and applications when issues are presented by the help
desk Monitor the fire walls and security policies for security. See if
Microsoft issued any patches.
•Stay late on the second Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of the
month in preparation of pushing out new patches.
•Make sure the latest anti-virus data files are updated from the vendor.
•Check the antivirus logs to make sure that scans have successfully
completed.
•Discuss with the Network Manager issues such as DHCP, DNS, etc. to
learn more about the network.
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Conclusion
• Personas help give us insight into how we can
fulfill our customer’s needs and goals.
• Personas are being integrated into our workflow
process to assist in making design decisions that
are based on real customer data.
• Personas help us prioritize what we need to
deliver to our customers.
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Links & References
Interesting links, source materials, and other
related items:
• Pragmantic Marketing: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com
• Cooper Design: http://www.cooper.com/
• Forrester: How Personas Drive Experienced-Based Differentiation:
Four Examples
• LANDesk Personas: LANDesk Human Factors Site:
http://hf.landesk.com
For more information please visit the HF Sunrise page on the intranet:
http://sharepoint/organizations/MSD/Engineering/SunriseEngineering/
hf/default.aspx
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