Martin
From BasKetUsabilityWiki
This persona was combined from the IT professional and the Home user skeletons.
Contents |
[edit] Personal Details
Martin is 29 and has been using computers since he got his first computer at the age of twelve. He is living with his girl-friend in Seattle, WA, in the United States. Since he is through with studying computer science, he is developing websites for a small company.
When using computers, he likes to try out new applications and to learn about new features. Normally, he does not read the documentation. Instead, he learns using new applications by just trying to use them for what their purpose is. He likes it if software tools have many features and options to choose from, and if he's got the time, he spends a while to adapt a tool to his needs. If this takes too long, though, he'd rather try another tool first.
He switched from Windows to Linux/KDE eight years ago because he likes the idea of being able to change the source code of any program if he wants to, and sometimes he sends in bug reports or even patches to the developers. He also likes the large number of configuration options KDE provides. Martin's real home is the console, though. Typing complicated, but flexible shell commands makes him feel safe.
[edit] Professional Life
Martin works as a project manager for a small company with 15 people developing websites. The websites he develops range from mostly static sites to medium-complex web information systems like web shops. As a project manager, his work consists of planning, developing and testing websites. In most projects, two or three people at most are directly involved into a project, so he takes part in almost every part of website development, including programming.
Martin has little interest in business issues, so he is happy there is a co-worker of his responsible for acquisition, calculating prices and such. Because the company is so small, there are only few formal procedures the employes follow. Most procedures that are in use are ad-hoc practices that just happen to work.
There is also a graphic artist employed in the company who does screen design for every project. In most projects, the clients already have some ideas about the layout, so Martin forwards any information he picks up in interviews concerning screen design to the graphic artist. He also usually has some ideas of his own. When planning a website, Martin interviews future or present users and other stakeholders and collects various information concerning the website and its use. He structures the information he collected to later share them with the other team members. He also makes project plans concerning various resources like time, budget and staff.
At work, he's got a PC on his desktop connected to a local network and the Internet.
[edit] Hobby
Computing is also a hobby of Martin's, and he uses computers, mobile phone and palmtop not only for practical use, but also for joy. He chose to use Linux because it is so flexible to configure and usable for different purposes. For example, his latest spare-time project is to build a media-center PC on his own, with special capabilities he wants. He also runs a home server and writes shell scripts for it from time to time.
He keeps contact informations of his friends and family in his PC and synchronizes them with his mobile phone. Sometimes, when traveling home, he has ideas for new projects and jots them down in his mobile, but then has to transfer them to the appropriate baskets later manually.
On his home PC, he manages lists of different things with BasKet: books to read, music to buy or download and other. Martin is also a passionate cook (opposed to the majority of geeks who only live on pizza), and he maintains a rather large collection of recipes.
[edit] BasKet Usage
For each project, he creates a basket with several sub-baskets. Because his projects have about the same size and because they are quite similar in structure, his basket structure also is similar in each project, but flexible. He has project-specific baskets for:
- to-do lists
- meeting protocols, interview protocols
- unsorted ideas
- bookmarks for documentation and testing, as well as buttons to restart the web application server or the database server with one click,
- bug lists which do not pose real bugs (i.e., which do not correlate to a specific line of code but are more general),
- logs of complex installation procedures he has to repeat later,
- passwords.
He also maintains some general computer-related baskets, like one for rarely used, hard-to-remember commands, or one for basic documentation (like the PHP documentation), which he copies to a project-specific basket when opening a new project.
For personal use, he has a "Private" basket with sub-baskets in which he maintains, for example,
- contact informations,
- project ideas,
- lists of songs or movies to download or buy,
- a "temporary" basket for ideas, bookmarks, and quick notes of any kind to just get them off his mind. Sporadically, he opens the temporary basket, deletes obsolete notes and sorts the others into appropriate baskets for later use.
- birthday gift ideas.
