Re: Setting criteria for end users

[John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

> This is my first post. I'm interviewing end users to improve the
> help file
> in a database program. What we want to do is take the data from the
> interviews and set each user in a specific category. I was
> wondering if
> anyone had a faormula for setting criteria to different levels of
> users.

Welcome

You are entering an area that had guided the development of our most
recent software applications.

Interaction Design, as described by Alan Cooper, has you create what
are called personas. A persona is a typical user...we have four major
ones and a couple of miner ones:

Mackenzie: The typical software asset manager
Phillipa: The average system administrator
Fred: The typical network manager
Carlos: The typical contract manager

We created these personas after over a year of interviewing users in
our field, before ANYTHING was created on our end in the way of
application specs or code. The idea is not to create them based on
what you know, but what they actualy do. An extreme example: It may
be discovered that the  typical user never prints something from an
application, but always exports data into Excel. In that case, the
application may not have a print button, but in-place of a Print
button, an Export button.

We actualy have pictures of these people framed and placed in our
hallways with the banner "Our Customers". (By the way....Mackenzie is
a babe)

Even though we've created these people, every time we want to develop
something in an application, we ask the question "Would Mackenzie use
the application this way?" or "Does the feature help Phillipa do her
job?" If the answer is No, we don't include the feature or implement
it that way, no matter how cool it may be or how much Product
Engineering (PE) wants it. 

In meetings, we actualy refer to these people during the discussions:

PE: "I want to implement the [feature] this way."
Us: "What would Mackenzie say about that?"

I could write on and on about this, but it's already been done. I'd
suggest you check out a book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum";
ISBN: 0672326140

=====
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

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