Personas

Our group felt that three personas would be necessary to cover the broad range of potential annotators. In the general case, we needed users both inexperienced and skilled with computers, both inexperienced and skilled in the domain of knowledge, and both inexperienced and skilled in the existing IMG interface.

In our personas, Bill represents the inexperienced computer user/genomicist with strong domain knowledge, unfamiliar with IMG. He would be the most qualified to modify annotations, but, problematically, the least personally inclined to learn the system. Martha Jane is the metagenomicist with moderate degrees of domain, computer, and system knowledge. A strong user need that she reflects is the ability to work with large quantities of gene data simultaneously. Phil is an experienced computer user/genomicist with strong system knowledge but poorer domain knowledge. Users like him have the potential to contribute a great deal of tentative information generated from their own research, but also have the potential to enter less reliable information given their limited experience in the field. Phil is our primary persona, as we expect younger, more computer savvy scientists to be most interested in using the collaborative functionality our system offers.

Bill Newman - naive user

Age 48, Bill is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Lab. He's studying a wide variety of microbes that are relevant to bioterrorism. Well into what is becoming a very successful career, he has become a respected authority on extremophiles, especially radiotolerant microbes and DNA repair. He was even interviewed on NPR after an anthrax scare at a postal sorting facility. He heads a lab with five graduate students and two research associates. Science is his life, more or less, though he enjoys outdoor activities like skiing and nature photography. Even while doing these activities, he often finds himself working through some difficult problem in the back of his mind. Someimes it seems like he spends 95% of his time thinking about science, but this is by now second nature to him and it suits him well. His wife, a physicist at Los Alamos, is an excellent match for him intellectually, though she is more inclined to let go of work when away from it. She had more focus on the family when their two kids were young and now finds time to read literature and perfect her skiing technique. Bill admires and appreciates her ability to disengage. The two of them live in a large house near Bandolier National Monument, where he shoots the local flora and fauna. One of his students has been tempting him to try a setup for digital microphotography, but he has a hard time imagining himself using anything other than his classic Nikon SLR. Between conducting his own research, guiding his grad students in theirs, and trying to keep up with his wife on the slopes, Bill doesn't have time to learn new bioinformatics tools, but he's comfortable with the ones he uses. He has only looked at the homepage of IMG and thought it might be useful someday.

Goals:

"You're only as good as your reputation"

Martha Jane Gilbert - metagenomics

Martha Jane is six months pregnant with her first child. This thrills her, in part because she is intrigued by the process but mostly because she looks forward to raising a daughter. (Last month she found out it'll be a girl.) She's decided to work through her third trimester so as to get as much work done before the delivery as possible and be able to spend more time with her newborn. She's concerned about how the growth of her family might affect her research, but she is optimistic. Martha's husband is a journalist, a political correspondent for Reuters (a "stringer"). They used to travel a lot together, especially through the E.U. Nowadays, she more often travels alone to scientific conferences or to sampling sites.

She studies environmental samples from acid mine drainage. Her interest is in determining a good approach to remediation through metagenomics, looking for biochemical pathways that might be interrupted to halt the acidification process or enhanced to counteract it. At 30, she is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, which happens not to be far from where she grew up. As a kid, she always wanted to become a professor at Oxford, so she is living her dream. Though she has a good curriculum vitae already, she is working hard at getting appointed a lecturer. She works in a cramped but lively office at the university and is working on a publication that she hopes will appear in Nature. She knows a lot of good research is going on in the U.S., so she travels to conferences there twice a year and has contacts with people who work on similar problems. With all her contacts in the U.S. and at various sites in the U.K., she gets so much email that she has problems managing her email box. Lately she has been trying various email clients to see which has better features for automatically sorting incoming mail. She's computer savvy and has a weakness for cool gadgets. Martha Jane is the first person she knows to have an iPod.

Goals:

Phil Dupont - Ph.D. student (Primary Persona)

Phil is a PhD student in the Plant and Microbial Biology Department at Rutgers University. He is in his third year, working on his thesis and thinks he knows what he wants to do. He is very enthusiastic about his field of study and spends a lot of time exploring new tools and methods. The main focus of his studies is the pattern and process of fungal evolution, both to understand the process and to make fungi the best model organisms for evolutionary biology. He is using genetics and genomics to find genes that maintain species and facilitate adaptation, and he is very excited about the growing number of fungi getting sequenced at various sequencing centers. He closely collaborates with two other laboratories, one at UC Berkeley and the other at Duke University. He is always looking for ways to engage in peer-to-peer idea exchange. He loves traveling to conferences, presenting his data, and talking to colleagues but so far he has only gone twice.

Phil is outgoing and has a great relationship with his boss. Despite his youth (he is 24) he has set himself apart from the majority of PhD students as a sharp-minded and determined individual.

He's been fascinated with biology from the days when he was little and always had pets back at his parents' house in North Carolina. Even now he has a frog that lives in the aquarium in the lab. The studies occupy most of his life, and he spends most of his time outside of class in the lab. His personal life hasn't been a great success, but he is not worried -- he has his whole life ahead of him and knows he will meet his soul-mate one day. Phil is athletic; he enjoys biking and fishing. He is also a good runner.

He mainly concentrates on doing his job well and knows that his diligence will be rewarded. He aspires to be an esteemed professor one day. He knows he's got a long way to go, but he is excited about his prospects. Now Phil is working on finishing research for his second publication.

Goals