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A "Power user" persona-- do you have such people?

Mary Beth Raven  November 21 2008 11:11:27 AM
Greetings conscientious customers,
In the design group, we thought we might need a "power user" persona. We were doing some work on things like the Composite application Editor and the Notes Widgets,  which are (in theory at least) targeted to a "power user." So, Sheri Branco on our team volunteered to do some interviews and draft a power user. See our draftbelow. It's pretty rough because we are having trouble finding people to interview.  Please read our draft and let us know the following:

Do you have anyone like this at your company?  
  • If so, are these the tools s/he uses?
  • Does s/he use other tools? which ones?
  • What are 1 or 2 specific "Advanced user"things this person might do?
  • Can you volunteer any of these people for an interview

Thanks,
Mary Beth

Our Draft:

Dan [insert  last name] is a Market Analyst at Renovations Inc., reporting to Marketing Manager [insert mgr name].  He is based in San Francisco, CA

Dan has been working at Renovations for 12 years and has been in the Marketing department for 7 years.  Dan initially started his career at Renovations working as part of the IT department and answered support calls coming from Renovations employees.  A little over 5 years ago, Dan made a transition into the Marketing department and his responsibilities include data collection and analysis to gain information on current and potential markets for Renovations products and services.  Dan is also is part of a small market research task force that gathers information on Renovations Inc's competition and reports back on potential market trends.

Dan's Work

Dan has a number of responsibilities in his role as a Market Analyst for Renovations Inc.:
  • Act as Team Lead in the Future Products group that assesses current product needs within the market and identify possible products to include in Renovations sales in the future
  • Coordinate test market activities prior to roll out of a product to all of Renovations stores
  • Evaluate customer satisfaction with the overall store experience and with the products offered within the stores
Dan's prior experience in the IT department allows him to provide Lotus Notes expertise that his greater team can benefit from.  That experience also helps Dan be less inhibited to try different features out within Notes or Domino Designer and he continues to learn from others and disseminate information by investigating what others have created.  While this "power user" knowledge of Lotus Notes isn't required for Dan's current job role, it definitely helps and is put to good use.   Some of Dan's additional responsibilities that have developed as a result of his previous role in support are:
  • Creation and maintenance of a few databases that act as repositories for the marketing information gathered
  • Developing kiosk-accessed Notes-based surveys to determine the customers' satisfaction
  • Helping team members set up customized Notes views that allow them to tailor the information to their needs
  • Providing assistance to group members when they need help with Notes or could benefit from a Notes feature that he can show them; such as mail Rules,  Archiving (to avoid deletion of mail due to a company quota), local replicas (to use the marketing databases when off-line etc.) Dan feels that his background has helped him know and understand the more complex features of Notes but he believes that having a technical background isn't necessary to understand and use these features, so he often takes the time out to explain and show them to  his co-workers.


Tools
  • Lotus Notes Client 8.0
  • Mail, Calendar, Contacts.  Dan makes use of Replication and Archiving in Notes.  His department at Renovations has a 60 day retention policy for mail and Dan likes to continually archive so that he can keep all his messages for future reference.  
  • Notes databases created for his Marketing group.  Dan likes to customize views in these databases to fit his needs and shares this information with others so that they are able to modify the views themselves, or he will help them do it if they aren't able to do it on their own.
  • Dan is sometimes able to find what he is looking for by searching even though he doesn't use the "more" advanced options.  He is often frustrated because he has multiple databases and has to try to remember which to search in (or search all of them).  
  • Domino Designer 8.0 - Dan uses this for basic updates and maintenance for the databases for his department that he had created based on Notes templates.  
  • Microsoft Office
  • IBM Thinkpad T60
  • IE 6
  • Blackberry and Blackberry Desktop Manager

Comments

1Erik Brooks  11/21/2008 3:07:26 PM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

Properties:

Something Dan likes to do is look at document field properties in the Notes client.

He uses this for basic design work in his own databases, and also when he starts snooping around other people's databases for ideas ("How are *they* tracking this?")

He would love to have that as part of the sidebar (I think we've talked about this in the 8.5 Beta forum, Mary Beth).

Searching/Filtering:

Dan loves the speed of Full Text searching, but hates that when he searches a categorized view he loses the data in all of the categorization columns, especially totals. He may not even have an FT index available if the admin doesn't let him create them.

As a result, for many of his searches he has to resort to breaking out Designer and creating a view. That way he gets only the docs he wants but still has the categories and totals he needs. He REALLY hates to have to do this in multiple databases.

2Ryan Benech  11/21/2008 6:04:41 PM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

IE 6 - NOT, he would definitely use Firefox (and Opera, Safari, and starting Crome)

MS Office - NOT, he's using OpenOffice, Google Docs and Symphony, working on templates between the three... He wants to collaborate with customers, but doesn't want to require them to have the latest Office...

He's making widgets that work with his Notes Apps... He's finding google widgets that help too, but having a damn hard time trying to install them.

He is still frustrated that he can't import data from a Symphony spreadsheet (like trade show contacts). He can't easily get a person's address and phone number while in Symphony docs... (or OpenOffice)...

And, why does he have to install a 3rd party tool to make PDFs of documents from his own apps. All of his other tools allow him to export to PDF directly... (Bonus if it is scriptable)

He accesses iNotes from home... (from a Mac)

3John Smart  11/22/2008 12:48:34 PM  what about a young punk instead?

I think it might be more important to make a persona that captures the stereotypical recent college grad that has no fear of IT.

For instance, recent marketing grads know how to make their own MS Access database!

I'd much prefer 'young punk' to power user personna. It essentially goes after the same attitude and willingness to expriment, but with more relevance to today and without cheating (assuming they already know technical trivia or are willing to put up with a geeky interface).

4John Smart  11/22/2008 12:48:43 PM  what about a young punk instead?

I think it might be more important to make a persona that captures the stereotypical recent college grad that has no fear of IT.

For instance, recent marketing grads know how to make their own MS Access database!

I'd much prefer 'young punk' to power user personna. It essentially goes after the same attitude and willingness to expriment, but with more relevance to today and without cheating (assuming they already know technical trivia or are willing to put up with a geeky interface).

5John Smart  11/22/2008 12:51:02 PM  repeat posting

grr. I swear I only hit that button once!

6Mary Beth Raven  11/22/2008 2:33:40 PM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

Hey John,

Does Paul Clemmons fit this bill, or did you want MORE of a young punk?

{ Link }

7John Smart  11/23/2008 10:48:46 AM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

Paul doesn't have the Notes client nor the need to integrate data using the mashup abilities. Plus, the young punk I'm thinking of wouldn't ask permission before Firefox, and has probably tried Chrome. He/she 'wastes' a lot of time with new tools, but when someone needs something done quickly, he's the guy to ask.

8Erik Brooks  11/23/2008 1:33:41 PM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

My post @1 would definitely fit John's "Young punk" persona also.

In fact, people who grew up with IT but don't have a formal CS background tend to pic up Notes and its app model very quickly.

They get confused with moderately complex relational databases, and likely don't know what normalization is. BUT, they understand the relatively simple concept of a Notes document, views, and forms.

9Erik Brooks  11/24/2008 5:01:03 PM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

Paste without formatting:

Dan also finds himself copying/pasting from various formatted sources (e.g. a web page) into various Notes documents, but doesn't want to disrupt the formatting of his current style in the document.

He frequently finds himself going through the extra step of pasting text into a text editor (UltraEdit, Notepad, etc.) to strip formatting and then copying it from there to paste it into his Notes document.

Dan longs for a "Paste - No formatting" or new keyboard shortcut (CTRL-SHIFT-V?) to perform this action.

Getting the selected document's UNID:

Dan sometimes needs to get the UNID of a document onto his clipboard so he can do something with it or track it in some way. Currently he has to do this:

1. Bring up the document properties window (wouldn't that be nice if it could be on the sidebar?)

2. Switch to the 5th tab ("+") -- more sidebar potential here

3. Go to the "identifier" data.

4. Go to the end and select backwards until he hits the first slash "/"

Dan longs for a button or a keyboard shortcut that would copy the doc's UNID to his clipboard.

10David Dickey  11/25/2008 11:23:07 AM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

> Dan longs for a button or a keyboard shortcut that would copy the doc's UNID to his clipboard.

Dan also longs for improvement in hotspot manipulation tools and related @functions that would make extracting a document's UNID unnecessary.

11Craig Wiseman  12/8/2008 11:26:40 AM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

Dan religously uses his journal, and syncs it to his blackberry. He'd really like to be able to get to it in iNotes, too.

12Stijn Soens  5/14/2009 2:30:25 AM  A Power user persona-- do you have such people?

From one of our customers I got a question related to a power user who wanted to archive folder based. The folders could still be archived to a single archive database but at the moment archiving is done automatically or based on document selection. This is OK but typically power users have a lot of mail folders and they might want to archive the folder, all documents and all subfolders. In the current Notes releases, you need to select the documents in every subfolder.