Persona

Conducted as as part of a larger project to create a web portal for railroad Transportation Managers.

Challenge

Railroad managers are responsible for scheduling, testing, training and discipling large groups of employees spread over very large geographic locations. The consequences of overlooking any of these are large fines and interuptions to business.

Solution

With employees spread over 23 states this became quite an undertaking. I began by analyzing all our users job positions as well as geographic location. In the end I visited 17 employees over 10 weeks in all 3 geographic regions. My original intent was to have each person “teach me their job” as in a traditional contextual inquiry where I would quietly observe them. However, it quickly became apparent that each of these individuals have so many duties that are so varied from day to day that the observation approach would not work for such a broad question. My approach changed to more of a structured interview format where I would ask what issues they face most and then ask to watch how they work through each of those issues.

Result

In the end I was able to group several hundred users into 8 personas and will be able to use those to inform our design decisions going forward about what information would be important to show each group without overwhelming them with information that isn’t as important to them. I find personas are also useful for building empathy and understanding with the business and development teams who may not always get a chance to meet the end users themselves.

Tools & Methods Used

• Profiles

• Contextual Inquiry

• Demographic Survey

Artifacts

• Field Study Proposal

• Persona

• Project News Article