MaNIS Interface Project

Assignment #2 - Project Personas, Goals, and Task Analysis


Contents

  • Team Management Structure
  • Revised Problem Statement
  • Rationale for Personas & Goals
  • Personas, Goals, and Tasks
  • Persona #1 - Robert Mismer
  • Persona #2 - Helen Williams
  • Persona #3 - Valerie Warren
  • Interview Notes


    • Team Management Structure


    Project Member Role(s) Core Competencies
    Mayjane Co Group Manager Project management
    Jane Lee Design Manager Web development
    Denise Green Documentation Manager Technical writing, software development
    Rebecca Shapley Evaluation Manager Domain familiarity, design

    Revised Problem Statement


    The MaNIS application (Mammal Networked Information System) is a network of distributed databases of mammal specimen data. The project is a collaboration between 17 research institutions and natural history museums, funded by the National Science Foundation. The MaNIS search interface makes information available for nearly a million museum specimens. This information can be used to enhance conservation and research initiatives, both locally and globally. The back-end has been developed, collaborations are in place, and an initial interface exists.


    The project goals are to perform a comprehensive assessment of the current MaNIS search interface, document proposed enhancements, and develop an interactive prototype for consideration by the MaNIS development team. These enhancements might also have an impact on other museum database query tools whose interfaces will be patterned after the MaNIS interface.


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    Rationale for Personas & Goals


    Three personas were identified for the project: a scientist with a taxonomic focus, a scientist with a geographic focus, and an educator. These personas evolved from a combination of factors such as the audience originally targeted by MaNIS developers, the interviews conducted by the team, as well as team members' insights drawn from expertise in relevant areas.


    The first two interviewees (Patton and Lidicker) are both museum curators and mammalogists, combining the two types of users identified by the development team as targeted primary users of MaNIS. Very early in the interview process, it became clear that the interviewees had no direct use for the MaNIS search interface in their capacity as curators. Their main goals as curators were to maintain their own collections and manage museum resources. However, the MaNIS search interface promises to be useful to them in their capacity as scientists. A search application like MaNIS can support their research activities on a particular species by providing a variety of information, in a variety of formats, and from a variety of sources. The persona of a scientist with a taxonomic focus was derived from these findings.


    The development team also envisioned educators as users of the MaNIS search interface. Interviews with educators (Janulaw and Robinson) clearly revealed very different information needs than those of scientists. While scientists found raw information from a MaNIS search useful, educators required that the raw information be converted and massaged into educational packages that would be useful to both educators and students. The persona of an educator was created to encompass all users who, like educators, require more sophisticated packaging of the raw data currently retrievable from the MaNIS application.


    The final persona was derived by merging insights from a conversation with one of the MaNIS project sponsors and an informal interview with a biologist. The MaNIS sponsor indicated that he expected policy makers to be primary users of the application. For instance, before building a road in a certain area, policy makers need information about ecosystems and species that might be affected by such a project. However, a conversation by one of the team members with a biologist (Patton and Orloff) revealed that policy makers did not necessarily need direct access to the data. The biologist indicated that she does research for groups (similar to policy makers) wherein she identifies the status of endangered species in certain geographical areas. This clearly illustrated the existence of an intermediary between a search interface like MaNIS and the policy maker. The realization led to the development of this intermediary persona - a scientist with a geographic focus. The persona of a wildlife biologist is representative of biologically-trained users of the MaNIS search interface who will focus on searching for information about a particular geographical area.


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    Personas, Goals, and Tasks

    Scientist with a Taxonomic Focus - Robert J. Mismer

    Robert is a tenured professor of Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He works with bats from Austral-Asia. He particularly enjoys figuring out systematics questions, but knows there's no money in that anymore, so writes grants for questions with significance for conservation or agricultural economics. As a result, his research lab attracts grad students interested in these questions, but not interested in taxonomy and systematics. He has a reputation in the department for putting a disproportional emphasis on the taxonomic work for his students' dissertation projects.


    Robert is in his early forties, 6 foot tall, brown-haired, balding with a bushy beard and twinkling blue eyes. His partner Sheila Lee is Australian, although her parents emigrated from Malaysia. Like her dad, Sheila is a dentist. Sheila and Robert have two kids, eight and 10 years old. Robert's dad fought in the Pacific in WWII. In college, Robert did a junior-year-abroad in Singapore and visited many of the places his father fought. He fell in love with Asia, started working on the bats, and spent as much time as possible doing fieldwork in that part of the world while collecting advanced degrees in Biology. He has contributed many specimens to the Smithsonian Mammal Collection, often from previously unsampled areas or under sampled species. He met Sheila on one of those fieldwork expeditions. He collects woodwind instruments, too, and frequently plays them for a laugh (for example, the Palauauan nose flute) on fieldwork social downtime or at department social events, though he doesn't claim to have any mastery.


    Robert drives an old, dented-but-clean dark blue Ford station wagon, and often dresses in wool flannel plaid shirts and timberlands. He replaces the timberlands with tevas when it's warm. He's tidy and efficient, and expects his equipment to be. Technological techniques need to earn their stripes just like any field technique. His computer is just another field tool, supporting different research techniques. When a colleague at a conference shares a technological approach to data gathering that might apply to one of Robert's questions, they'll discuss the technique over dinner, and then get into the field together for Robert's direct tutorial in the technical aspects. He'd get training just like in any field technique. He learns what he needs to know to accomplish the desired task, and expects to be able to repeat it as needed to get the work done. He's impressed with the flexibility computers show, but seldom has time to explore new things. He believes in people-hours - putting in the time and effort in the field to answer questions - rather than technological shortcuts.


    Robert's Goals:

    Robert's Tasks:

    Frequency of Tasks:

    This set of tasks will be done together in a short period of time on an infrequent basis, perhaps once every few years to as frequently as a few times a year. These infrequent searches will be triggered when new questions requiring research on a different taxon arise.


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    Wildlife Biologist - Helen Williams

    Helen is a 49-year-old wildlife biologist living in the Berkeley hills. She's a California native, born and raised in Sacramento. As a child, she played outside whenever she could. She was fascinated by the natural world and collected insects and wildflowers. Her family went on long camping trips every summer to remote areas in Montana and Wyoming, where her father had camped with his parents when he was a child. Love of the outdoors runs in the family, and for Helen the summer trips were formative experiences. She spent hours with her sister and brother playing in meadows and streams, and was able to observe deer, antelope, and moose in their natural habitat. She has never forgotten the wonder of those early experiences.


    When it was time for Helen to go to college, she stayed close to home, getting her BS in Conservation Biology and MS in Ecology from UC Davis. She now works for a small environmental consulting firm in Berkeley, performing field studies on endangered species and their habitats. She's become an expert on the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse. Her projects generally require travel to various locations throughout California. When she's in the field she takes all her field notes by hand and occasionally uses a voice recorder. She transcribes these notes to the computer when she is back in the office.


    Helen loves being outdoors and hates having to stay inside. However, as she gets older she is growing concerned about her sun-damaged skin and achy joints. She realizes that she needs to do more preparation work on the computer before she goes out into the field, to try to reduce the amount of time she spends outdoors. Helen considers computers a necessary evil-she uses them to research particular sites before she goes out to visit them, often looking at the historical distributions of specific species. She does not consider herself to be an expert user of computers, nor does she want to be.


    Helen is patient, shows great attention to detail, and considers herself a "wash and wear" woman. She is not bothered at all by spending a rainy night in a tent, although she is always happy to return to her home in Berkeley. She drives a Ford Explorer, which she feels very guilty about, but is great for hauling all her gear when she goes into the field. Helen is single, but has a strong sense of community with friends and family in the Bay and Sacramento areas, many of whom also work in the field of conservation biology.


    Helen's Goals:

    Helen's Tasks:

    Frequency of Tasks:

    A few times a year, or when new research questions arise.


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    Educator - Valerie Warren

    Valerie Warren is a fifteen-year veteran of the Oakland Unified School District. She currently teaches biology to tenth graders at Oakland High School. Valerie majored in biology at Sonoma State and earned her teaching credential at the same time. When she was younger, Valerie thought that she wanted to become a doctor. However, after working at a kid's science summer camp after her first year of college, she discovered that she really enjoyed working with kids and teaching them about nature. She switched her focus from pre-med to teaching and graduated with honors.


    Valerie loves teaching, but it's getting harder and harder to cope with the budget cuts that hit the district every year. She feels like her resources are dwindling at a time when it's getting more difficult to engage her students and keep them interested in school. In addition, there is so much administrative paperwork to take care of, she doesn't have time to try to develop new activities for her students. A recent field trip required so much paperwork - all students' parents had to sign multiple release forms - that Valerie is not sure if they'll be able to go anywhere off campus again.


    Valerie's interest in biology grew from her love of the outdoors. On the weekends, she goes hiking in Tilden Park and sometimes in the Marin Headlands area. Valerie also enjoys bird watching, so she always brings a pair of binoculars with her. After a crazy week at school, she finds that being outdoors is the only way for her to relax. Her husband Max often accompanies her on hikes, but she doesn't mind when he doesn't.


    Valerie and Max live in a small, craftsman style house near the Berkeley-Oakland city line. They moved there shortly after Valerie started teaching in Oakland. Valerie grew up in Santa Rosa with her parents and two older brothers. She credits her toughness and ability to manage a classroom to growing up with her brothers. Her parents still live in the same home, and she and Max visit them every couple of weeks.


    Valerie's Goals:

    Valerie's Tasks:

    Frequency of Tasks:

    This set of tasks will be done once per year for 2-3 lessons.


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    Appendix - Interview Notes


    Bill Lidicker, Scientist
    Jim Patton, Scientist
    Jim Patton
    Dale McCullough, Scientist
    Al Janulaw, Teacher
    Rebecca Robinson, Teacher
    Sue Orloff, Wildlife biologist