Category: Personas

Part 1

Name: Aaron Smith

Age: 25

Location: York, PA

Education: Bachelor’s

Occupation: Junior Accountant

Income: $50,000/year

Hobbies: Watching reality TV, working out, going to gay bars

Tech experience: Intermediate: Uses Microsoft Office Suite extensively, streams movies and TV shows

Part 2

Aaron Smith is a 25-year-old gay man who lives in Central PA. He’s been working in an entry-level office job for a couple of years and wants desperately to get a better salary away from his awful boss. He goes to the gym each morning before work and has a couple friends there. Once he gets home, Smith is always exhausted from the monotony. He usually puts on reality TV shows and competitions to turn his brain off, especially Rupaul’s Drag Race. Lately he’s been curious if there are any queer people in the area. He knows one or two from the gym, but they can’t be the only ones despite their town’s small population. He has also been wondering a bit if there were other LGBT communities in the area that have existed or might still be around. Sure, he saw the Philadelphia Pride Parade once when he was just discovering himself, and he’s been to a few gay bars in the city, but that can’t have just been it. Smith wants to find out if there were more LGBT+ communities in his area and what they have done, but he needs a place to start. While he may have the technical knowledge to go searching for something, he won’t stay on a website that’s unwieldy to use for very long.

Part 1: Create some basic information about your user. Be creative (and feel free to use humor!), but think about who may potentially view this website (professors, reporters, editors, students, etc.). 

Name: Troy Mitchell 

Age: 64 

Location:  Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Education: Master’s 

Occupation: Retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic 

Family status: Married, 0 Kids 

Income: $95,000/yr 

Hobbies: Fixing odds and ends, drinking a beer with friends, enjoying life 

Tech experience: Good at fixing mechanics like cars and fridges, not so great with a computer 

Troy is a retired Lumber Mill Operator and Mechanic born in 1960 in Scottsdale, Arizona who wants to show his wife the songs he grew up with as Norway had a very different music scene. While he knows how to pull up Spotify, he has some difficulties finding an all encompassing playlist. He himself was too young to get involved with the protests and hippie culture, but his parents were firm activists during the time, so he grew up with songs ranging over decades about what was wrong with the world at the time. He finds a playlist that has plenty of songs from his childhood which also has a link to a project looking at these songs. Though he was not intending to, he goes down a rabbit hole into his childhood and his parents’ lifestyle while also learning plenty he didn’t know.

Part 1: 

1. Name: Alex Scrollman;
2. Age: Early 20s; 
3. Location: Unspecified major Urban Sprawl 
4. Education: College Education;
5. Occupation: College Student
6. Family Status: Single;
7. Income: Biweekly paycheck of 120 dollars
8. Hobbies: Model UN, Debate, College Newspaper;
9. Tech Experience: Chronic Scroller;

Part 2:

This user is primarily interested in general world politics, more specifically trying to expand their knowledge of African politics. They need to be able to concisely understand very complicated processes in order to keep up with current affairs. This user’s main priority is efficiency, they want to update themselves on the most important events quickly. Furthermore, acknowledging that politics is very complex, they value transparency of sources to make sure that the information displayed is accurate. They mainly use their phone, so the UX Design must be phone-friendly. They are fairly experienced with technology, being a heavy social media user, being more used to scrolling rather than clicking.