As noted in an earlier post, we developed personas to guide our development and to serve as users in our product mock-ups. When the design team creates a template for what the commenting structure might look like and how it might function, they use the Bristol, Willow and Track personas to post example comments.
The basic characteristics of our personas were hashed out a few weeks ago and we have been adjusting and building upon them ever since. They now have histories, families, hobbies, friends, media interests and, of course, facebook profiles. This enhanced familiarity with Bristol, facilitates the design team’s creation of comments she might make on a particular article (e.g. what she would say, how she would like to say it, and who she would want to say it to), which ultimately helps us create something geared to those needs.
These Web sites have good examples of what a bio/persona should look like:
Chopsticker Agile Modeling
p.s. We think Bristol-berrywould dress up as Sarah Palin for Halloween.
Bristol Berry
Twenty-eight year-old Bristol is married with two children and has lived in Cedar Rapids her whole life. The family owns their home and has lived ini it for four years. She has a two-year old daughter and a five-year-old son. The family has a dog named Smuckers and a hamster named Larry. They have a mortgage and three credit cards.
Bristol is a stay at home mom who spends her days taking care of the children – making crafts, teaching mini-lessons, cooking and maintaining the house. She walks for a half an hour through the neighborhood every morning when the weather allows.
On Tuesdays she cares for her neighbor’s two children and on Thursdays her children stay with the neighbor, which allows the mothers to run errands, and the kids can socialize. The majority of her soical engagements involve getting together with friends from the neighborhood, childrens’ birthday parties and the occasional social outing with her husband’s work friends. Most of her immediate family lives in Cedar Rapids — mother, father and sister. Bristol attends church twice a month.
She uses the internet to send emails to her friends and family, visit parenting forums, share, upload and view picitures, and use facebook. She spends about an hour or two on the computer – when her kids are watching movies or otherwise occupied, and when her husband is home after work. She does a quick check of the Gazette online and watches the evening news on KCRG.
She has a general interest in what is happening in the Cedar Rapids area. Her specific concerns are crime and news about area schools. She is especially interested in flood recovery efforts because they are thinking of buying a new home and want to know about the housing market in different neighborhoods and how neighborhoods are changing in response to development and recovery efforts.
[...] been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process [...]