Personas

As a way to pack all my findings into one node of information, I created personas to represent the ideal users of the product. In this Smashing magazine article, it's explained how personas are fictional characters that represent a sizable part of the user base. By using personas, I find that it is easier and more effective to portray research into the production phase because I can think of features related to if they will be used by a user.

Jane

Age: 22 Occupation: Intern in a PR company. Level: Basic

She has a small blog and has to work on her computer normally. Uses Word as text editor, she doesn't have too much interest in how computers work or in improving with them. She doesn't think that she's bad with computers, she's just not interested, she just sees them as a way of completing her work. She uses common shortcuts like copy and paste, but that's it, she's an avid clicker.

She uses Word because she has always used it, she would like to have more styling options and make her work look more attractive but the options that Word gives her are limited and the customization of these options are too complicated for her to be interested in. She uses the toolbar but doesn't care about the things she doesn't understand. If she needs to learn some new things from the toolbar for her work, she will.

She gets impatient very fast when things don't work the way she wants to, like for example when she is formatting text in order to make headings and subheadings and has to keep going up to check the font size of already made headings. She would rather take notes on paper instead of her computer because it's just easier.

She wouldn't mind to know more about shortcuts but she just doesn't want to spend the time getting used to them and the process of learning how to make them part of her work flow seems like more of a hustle than an investment. She's used to clicking on things and doesn't thing there needs to be a better way.

Daniel

Age: 26 Occupation: Freelance graphic designer. Level: User

He spends a lot of time meeting people and having customer interviews in order to create a strong brief in order to get a good feel of what the client wants. He would like to have a mac but doesn't have the resources to actually buy one. He only wants it becuse it's what cool designers use, he doesn't really understand the difference between one and another.

He uses Google Drive as much as he can, as he likes to have everything in the cloud, when in a client meeting he doesn't use any kind of editing as he needs to write as fast as possible and doesn't have the privilege to keep his notes clean. He just writes bullet points as paragraphs and then makes a new line when he needs a new point. He likes to use headings and subheading as much as he can and customize his content as much as possible.

He uses keyboard shortcuts for saving, copy pasting and finding, he also sometimes uses the shortcuts for bold and italics but often forgets that he can use them and just clicks on the toolbar. He has tried to learn more shortcuts before but he doesn't force himself enough to actively learn them and when he looks at the cheat sheet, he feels overwhelmed by the amount of things there are and gives up.

Rob

Age: 34 Occupation: Writer at a mountain biking magazine Level: Advanced user

He really enjoys his job, and really likes to be proactive when trying to improve. He goes to meetups, conferences and courses in order to be better at his job. He uses markdown as much as possible but sometimes he can't because he needs to work with other team mates that don't use it.

He actively looks for new software that may help him work better. He is interested in technology but doesn't have any knowledge of coding. He uses markdown editors but doesn't use any of the developer's functionality. He looks for ways to pass markdown into word format in order to use it all the time.

He tries to teach other people what markdown is, but he is not successful because other people don't understand the advantages of using markdown. He believes markdown is niche and for the "nerd" culture.