Personas

According to our interviews and the observation, most people who go to McDonald's share the same basic goal: they just want to have a quick, cheap lunch. Since there are not many variations in their basic goals, we decide to choose only 3 personas: a student, an employee, and a housewife. The distinctions among their characteristics will contribute more to our design process. We try to accommodate the profiles of our interviewees into our personas. However, we develop the last persona from a Spanish-speaking housewife with kids, whom we saw during our observation.

There are other kinds of repeat McDonald’s customers that we choose not to make them our personas. Some homeless people go to McDonald’s during lunch hour, but they may be an ‘edge case’ persona. Moreover, they are also not familiar with computers and are not likely to use smart cards. Travelers/tourists may also buy food from McDonald's, but they are not likely to be repeat customers and not likely to buy smart cards just to use our system.

Jeff Zhou

We call our first persona Jeff Zhou, a 23-year-old Electrical Engineering graduate student of the University of Illinois, Urbana – Champaign. He is originally from China and does not have a girlfriend. He gets a full scholarship plus a stipend from the university. He is very familiar with computers since he uses them a lot to do his assignments and projects. He lives in a 2-bedroom apartment with a roommate, but they do not get along very well.

Since Jeff cannot cook, he usually goes to fast-food restaurants. He goes to McDonald’s about once to twice per week, during his 30-50 minute break between his classes. Since he often goes to fast food restaurants, he likes to try new menus that the restaurants offer. He also likes to buy what is on discount. He does not like pickles. However, since he thinks that it is too much trouble to mention that to the cashier, who may not understand the first time he say ‘pickle’ in his Chinese accent, he decides to throw the pickle away himself. He does not like to have coins in his wallet/pocket.

When going to McDonald’s, his goals is to get food, preferably the one in the new menu or the ‘special deal’ ones, as soon as possible.

Julie Woods

Our second persona is Julie Woods, a 43 year-old payroll clerk who works at the company where her husband works. They often have lunch together during their 1-hour lunch break. They go to McDonald’s about once a week. They live in Columbus, Ohio with their teenage daughter and a German-shepherd dog. Julie likes to surf the web during her spare time at home.

Julie likes McDonald’s food, but she also cares about healthy diet. She usually wants to know how much fat she consumes everyday. Therefore, she usually orders either chicken or fish sandwich at McDonald’s. Sometimes she also orders something from the new or ‘special deal’ menu. However, she usually does not remember the exact name of the food, she just recognizes how they look.

When going to McDonald’s, her goal is to get her favorite food quickly and calculate how much fat she has already consumed on that day.

Karina Carlos

Our third persona is Karina Carlos, a 35 year-old housewife who likes to take her kids to McDonald's on weekends, about twice a month. She has two children: 11 year-old Alex and 8 year-old Antonio. Karina is originally from Mexico, but now she and her family live in Pinole, California. Karina does not speak English very well, so she would prefer to speak Spanish to the McDonald's cashier. She used to work with basic computer-based applications for a short period at work before she got married. Now she is not exposed to using computers very much, but her kids like to play computer games at home. However, she uses ATM machines a lot.

Alex does not like pickles and Karina does not like tomatoes. The kids like to order Happy Meals because they love the toys that come with the meals.

When going to McDonald’s, Karina's goal is to get her food for her and her kids quickly, and to collect the toys from the Happy Meals for her kids.

Next: Task Analysis