Assignment 1
Assignment 2
Assignment 3
Assignment 5
Assignment 6
Assignment 7
Assignment 8
Assignment 9
Personas & Goals
Hans Euler • Tammy Jones • Albert Tan • Shannon Evans • Megan Reed
Hans Euler
Nickname: The “Swiss Army” Man, the Jack of All Trades
Technology level: High
Design level: Medium
Interest in User Interface Design Patterns: High
Hans is a 35-year old Programmer/Analyst IV for the College of Letters & Science. He lives in Alameda with his wife Sue and their two daughters. On the weekends, he enjoys camping with his family, reading history and nonfiction books, and occasionally hanging out with a few old college buddies.
In 1992, Hans graduated from Berkeley with a degree in history, but wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do for a career. He was always somewhat interested in programming and had tinkered around with various languages starting with BASIC. When the “dot com” boom came he found his calling and mastered HTML and Java while working at various startups. After the bubble burst, Hans fell into a job as a Programmer/Analyst III, working on improving a document repository for a research unit on campus. He was then promoted to a Programmer/Analyst IV position in charge of maintaining various web applications as well as managing one other programmer and two part-time tech support persons.
As the lead P/A of his department, Hans has to juggle various duties during the day. He’s often involved in every aspect of the development of an application, from coding to information architecture to creating graphics. While he gets to code a portion of his time, he also has to check on various servers since his other programmer has no system admin experience. Besides several new projects he has in the works, Hans hopes to eventually overhaul the department’s homepage to make it easier for researchers from other institutions find information. The current homepage design was inherited and features awkward navigation and layout. However, the faculty are so accustomed to the current design, Hans can only make small changes to the pages without having to hear an earful from someone.
Hans has an interest in usability, especially due to his experiences with bad design, but no formal training. He wants to learn from other programmers and designers about some layouts that have worked and their processes to arrive at those designs. He thinks that design patterns would provide some best practices and advice in context to what works within the university environment.
Goals
- Learning new professional skills for career advancement and intellectual curiosity.
- Make their job easier by making processes and systems more efficient.
- Produce high quality finished product.
- Wants high level of job satisfaction.
Tammy Jones
Nickname: The Enthusiastic Tech Manager
Technology level: Medium
Design level: Medium
Interest in User Interface Design Patterns: High
Tammy is a 36-year-old Computing Resource Manager. She has worked at various startups but found herself at the university after the bubble burst. She’s always been an active blogger and interested in the latest trends in web technology. During her off time, she uses meetup.com to organize weekend meetings of Chihuahua owners in the city in Noe Valley.
Tammy tries to stay updated of potential projects on campus. She and her team of programmers had gained some fame from a recent project to improve workflow in the CPHS office using an online application. She introduced some improvements in the development process using RUP. While she has tremendous influence within her department, she sees the inefficiencies across campus in code reuse and sharing of ideas.
Goals:
- Minimize potential complaints in regards to any projects that she endorses.
- Make a good impression on the campus community by creating finished projects that are successful.
- Maintain a team of happy and motivated people to ensure high quality products.
- Provide influence on the overall strategic direction of projects on campus.
Albert Tan
Nickname: The Data Hacker
Technology level: Very High
Design level: Low
Interest in User Interface Design Patterns: Very Low
Albert is a 30-year-old Programmer/Analyst in the College of Chemistry. He majored in computer science at the University of Illinois and came out to California when his friend told him about a job opening in his department. Albert has just recently past the 5 year mark of working at the university and has now vested with the university savings plan. His office is located in a basement in Barrows Hall with no windows, and pipes running overhead. Outside of work Albert is a member of a chess club and enjoys sci-fi films.
While Albert acknowledges the fragmented bureaucratic nature of the university, he’s also excited by the challenge of getting data from disparate sources and aggregating it. With the lack of a central data warehousing solution on campus, he’s had to forge ahead and create his own data warehouse. Albert is quite proud of his ingenious solution and can’t wait to release his latest creation: a data transaction coordination application with the ability to serve out data to other units on campus via web services.
Albert works with a computing resource specialist who spends her time mocking up web pages. He usually goes to her to have her slap on a quick UI. He’s not too interested in user interface design and feels that he has more important things to tackle.
Goals:
- Spend more time working on technical challenges and novel solutions for them.
- Do as little front end design work as possible.
- Meet his manager’s expectations by delivering work on time.
Shannon Evans
Nickname: Ms. “I Have Every Form You’ll Ever Need”
Technology level: Low
Design level: Low
Interest in User Interface Design Patterns: Doesn’t totally get it
Shannon is a 50-year-old Administrative Assistant for the Center for Forestry. She has worked for the university for more than 10 years. She is a single mother with two sons, one in college and one in high school. She has a hectic schedule of commuting to work from Contra Costa county and getting home in time to make dinner and spend some time with her kids.
Aside from this, Shannon is usually the hub of all administrative activities in her department. If she is not helping coordinate things for faculty, she’s busy finding and filing forms for various projects and managing her work study students. To add to this, a year ago her boss asked her to start building a website and paid for her to take some introductory courses on Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
While she finds the web to be interesting and fun, Shannon gets frustrated with the lack of time and help she can get on making the website. The department’s only programmer is busy working on the legacy accounting mainframe. What she needs is more help and explanation on how things work on the web and how she can speed up her webpage production.
Goals:
- Quickly build pages and easily change out content on them.
- Stay ahead of her to-do list without getting too stressed.
- Make sure her manager is happy with her work.
- Maximize that amount of time she spends with her family.
Megan Reed
Nickname: Designer Goddess
Technology level: Medium
Design level: Medium-High
Interest in User Interface Design Patterns: Low-Medium
Megan is a 30-year-old Computer Resource Specialist. She works for the on-campus film archive. She initially started working there part-time as an undergrad taking tickets but started picking up some work from one of the programmers by learning HTML and editing web pages. Megan has a keen sense of color and layout. She’s a skilled photographer and enjoys spending the weekend heading out to Half Moon Bay and taking black & white photos of the landscape.
With three other programmers, Megan spends her time tweaking the layout and running the designs by other editors and managers. She knows a lot about following web standards and good practices. She actively reads A List Apart and considers Jeffery Zeldman a god. She uses a WYSWYG editor to quickly lay out content and then hand codes the page for further refinement.
Megan does not need much help with the visual design of the pages, and has some natural ability for interface design. She’s not particularly interested in UI patterns but might be interested in occasionally consulting a library of patterns for ideas or just to refresh her memory. It usually suffices for her to simply get user feedback to help guide her design.
Goals:
- Spend her time on the more creative aspects of web development and minimize tedious coding.
- Create portfolio pieces worthy of showing off her design skills.
- Become a well respected designer and have people consult her for design expertise.