Persona+Scenario_Peter Smith

Persona 4

Peter Smith, age 52 -- Senior Consultant

Peter Smith works in California Software, Orange County, California. As a senior consultant, he is an expert in legacy extension, EAI solutions and business intelligence. His work is mainly to help global enterprises migrate legacy applications to Windows, Unix and Linux and make valuable corporate data easily available to their employees, business partners, and customers.

Peter spent 28 years in information industry, within a background in implementing migration or SOA integration projects in Midrange/Mainframe environments. He is a person with "can do" attitude and willingness to work through and help clients. In the weekend, he love to do a little golf or fishing. He plans for family trips in different spots around the world every year.

Peter is a 52-year-old daddy with two children. Justin goes to Stanford University and studies in political science. Diana attends to University High School in Irvine. Peter cares about the politics and the social participating because he insists that next generation should grow up in a clean world without media monopoly. He also encourages his children think independently. He is a typical US citizen who has American Dream and wants to make the world better with free speech.

He only reads, views, or accesses high-quality media like CNN, PBS, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, or Business Week in his daily life. He is also an early adopter for most 3C products in electronic consuming market. Besides personal computer, he uses PDA, GPS, bluetooth earphone and digital camera.

He subscribes several blogs and web sites with RSS FeedReader. He loves the automatically subscribe system because he could update information very quick. The reason why he goes to TheyOwn.net is that he wants to participate in discussion about social justice. Peter believes that people could improve the media content, transfer the media system and expand the communications rights of ordinary people through grassroots organizing, education, networking and advocacy.

Scenario:

Peter is a frequent user of TheyOwn.net. Averagely speaking, he accesses TheyOwn.net two times a week. The first connection between TheyOwn.net and peter was because he attended a public hearing on Orange County Community Library which was held by Voice of Orange County FM 93.7 and TheyOwn.net. Peter and other parents had a great discussion of how the media ownership effect media contents to our children. After that hearing, he started to become familiar with the media ownership issue and surfs relevant websites often.

Peter uses RSS FeedReader 3.0 to subscribe new information on TheyOwn.net. He always reads articles on TheyOwn.net in a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon. He scans through the titles and finds if there is anything interests him. If he finds some, he will click the links to TheyOwn.net and find more related details. He considers that an engineer should not only talk to machines everyday but also communicate with different opinions from different aspects. Social network form the Internet could help him know people who care this issue. That is why sometimes he posts some comments for certain topics he wants to discuss with.

Because Peter wants to be an active user, sometimes he will attend some events held by TheyOwn.net. He thinks these participances carry out his concerns to the community.

week8-Production and QA

The new title of second-edit in this book would be: Build and Integrate. Thinking about the concept of “redesign” he taught us from this book, maybe he use the same concept when he changed the name of title to make his point much clearer.

This phase gives us a clear review on website designing from Target Specifications, Functionality and Features, Design and Layout, File Structure and Directory Preference to Server and Hosting Information. Establishing the guidelines and worksheets will help project manager create a clear blueprint of the whole process.

The author also talks about the communication between designer and clients, which I think is an important part in developing a website. People have different aesthetic feelings and technical meta-knowledge, thus we always have different view to the same thing. (On the other hand, that’s what makes things interesting, isn’t it?) That’s why communication between human beings is also important as communication between human and machines.

I also learned an interesting concept from this chapter, which is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get.) The advantage of WYSIWYG could save lots time in coding and make your layout stable. After all, we shouldn’t forget the golden principle “Smaller is Better.”

After attending to this class, I found that I become picky on the interface and the utility. This quarter I participated in developing a community website in Taiwan. They planned to build a new community website offers with blog/album/video/group…like MySpace. In the process of negotiation to the planner, I found that convenience and ease are the most two key factor which will deeply affect people’s willing to adapt to the new interface. Even they designed a fancy interface with cute icons and give people lots space of uploading, the promotion of the new website still hard. That was why we paused the speed of promotion and tried to make the website clearer and easier. From Beta version to official version, there is a long long way.

It is almost the end of winter quarter, but I still haven’t get really familiar with HTML or other webpage languages. It broke I aim this quarter. Fortunately, I still have some time to learn it in the coming weeks. Like learning English, I shouldn’t be afraid of practicing more.

Group1_Persona 1 to 4

I add Ragan’s persona in Persona2.

Persona1:

Susy is high school student who cares about the social justice. She loves the out door activities and pop music. She runs for the president of student association in 2007. She is also a journalist in school’s news paper Viewers. She has her own blog which discusses about thoughts of life and observation of the media. This quarter she plans to do a project about the media ownership. She goes to TheyOwn.net in order to find some information about big media and the issue of media ownership.

Persona2:

Jack is a 22 year old college student who is a frequent MySpace user. He begins to notice that more and more advertising is showing up throughout the site and wonders what's up. Jack remembers that a couple years back News Corp bought MySpace and he begins to think maybe that has something to do with the changes. He wants to find out more about News Corp and where the company's interests lie. He goes to TheyOwn.net in order to find out what other companies News Corp owns.

Persona3:

Nadiah is a visiting scholar in communication school and also a Phd student from NanYang Technological University in Singapore. Her research topic focuses on the regulation in mass media. Because the regulation policy in Singapore is strict and one way from top to bottom, thus she comes to US to hear more diverse opinions. She is familiar with all major website or institution that cares about media ownership.

Persona4:

Peter is a 50-year-old daddy who works in a software company with two children. He cares about the politics and the social participating because he insists that next generation should grow up in a clean world without media monopoly. He also encourages his children think independently. He is a typical US citizen who has American Dream and wants to make the world better with free speech. He only reads, views, or accesses high-quality media in his daily life.

Group1_Function

Article Search

We mainly offer contents in word format, and our purpose is to gather all relevant information about media ownership, thus the function of search is important. In this project, we plan to have a database after we complete our layout.

RSS Subscribe

Most of our readers might be advanced or unique visitors which means they visit often in a period of time. In order to have more interactions with them, we could offer the function of RSS Subscribing. On the other hands, sending our articles directly to visitors who don’t come could often recall them to pay attention on this topic.

Video Uploading

Because the topic of media ownership is on the spot, there must be some important or related speeches, forums and announcements occur everyday. Video clips could be collected by web managers or users.

What’s new

In order to display the latest news, we can pick the current news or events in this specific column. Five pieces of news on this column will be an ideal number.

Upcoming Events

As a website focus on public interests, we might cooperate with or participate in some other public events. Thus, providing the upcoming events in the center of page might be a good way to promote those events.

Put Comments

The value of every single opinion is depends on how many times it was been shared. The purpose of fighting for media ownership is to protect the independent speech. We encourage our visitors put their comments after reading the articles or viewing the videos.

** I notice that we said that no membership required on our website according to Ragan’s Success Metrics. Thus, should we save a space for users to sign up? Otherwise I have no idea how to track the author after they put a comment or upload a video clip. Maybe we can let general users read all they want to read free, and set up a simple sign up process for users who want to post or upload.

week7-Visual Interface

Websites about E-commerce

The definition of E-Commerce we discussed last week will be: Where people can purchase(buy/sale) goods or services online.

Examples bumped into my mind will be the most famous E-Commerce platform-- ebay who sales everything online first; then will be Amazon who is specific in book market in the beginning; in past few years, Craigslist is a growing company in E-Com as well. About the service, visiting Enterprise Rent-a-car or Southwest Airline will meet people's needs to travel without concern. The last one I would like to mention about is the Apple Store which has fancy design.

Book Review_ Emotional Design

Emotional Design -- Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman

I’d read the book The Design of Everyday Things in my college. The new concepts of information design was attracted me. It’s time I want to see more about the part “emotion” he added in his new book. When the technology reached a certain level (especially in function), people started to seek for something more than the basic usability. There is the niche of emotional design. Users not only buy a product in every purchase but also buy a symbol of fashion and taste. In the age of experience economy, the factor of emotion affects enormously. The book Emotional Design just shows the trend properly.

As a master of engineering and psychology, Norman shows marvelous understanding in the communication between human beings and machines. Like the slogan of Nokia Co.— Connecting People, the interface is the best bridge between users and machines. As a communicator between information and audience, I also have to keep the spirit on my mind. How to make my information easy to be understood? How to make the focus clear? How to make the first-time-user feel comfortable when they need something from the content I provide?... The book Emotional Design gave me some new angles to think of.

How we arrange the order of Chinese contents?

Renda addressed an interesting question in the class: how we arrange or categorize the order of Chinese contents since the alphabet order isn't suitable to Chinese characters?

I call it "interesting" because sometimes we don't even think over it though we use it everyday. (I guess we miss many things in our daily lives as well.:P) There are some ways to categorize.

# By the order of the number of strokes (in a character)

“一” (means “one”) goes before “二” (means “two”)

# By the order of notional phonetic alphabet / phonetic symbols (we call it “注音符號”)

“不” (pronounce as “bu ㄅㄨˋ” ) goes before “跑” (pronounce as “paoㄆㄠˇ” )

*Only used in Taiwan

# By the order of Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音)

*Broadly used in the worldwide

There are some links about changing notional phonetic alphabet to Hanyu Pinyin:

http://www.cnpedia.com/pages/knowledge/baserule.htm

http://cls.admin.yzu.edu.tw/pronounce.htm

IA_Web Trend Map 2007

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/webtrends2007

Some concepts on this website are cool. Good for my brain, hopefully for yours as well.

week5_Develop Site Structure

The author cited a phase of words from Peter Morville which I think is the main spirit of information design, “creating consistent and functional systems for navigation, graphics, page layout, and the title languages so that the user knows where to go, what to do, and it encourages them to return.”

Viewing things in different point of view in also important, the author emphasizes fours perspectives: Content-view, Site-View, Page-View and User-view. In deed, as a channel to communicate site visitors, site developers and site holders, a website should embrace multiple functions of different aspects. In the office, we always said that “One will always change his/her entire brain after changing his/her position.” Maybe the meaning of these words is kind of sarcastic, but it really shows that we have to have flexibilities when we try to develop a website.

Content is king. The word is the principle of every medium. We often have too many contents but have no idea how to remove the information we don’t need. How many information you want to display on your website is the scope of content. A specific website and a general website will definitely have different depth and width. The word “chunk” is a good idea to organize contents. By categories of color, style, size, pattern and most important of all, the relationships among the contents, we could have a clear view to classify our information.

The next step is to build a clear sitemap of our website. In order to classify all the information, we should have the concepts of “layers”, like a tree diagram or end-means. The team of website developers has to group up all the contents and name them with a good category. (Also remember, try to use users’ point of view to check if your category is easy to be understood or not.) Nobody is supposed to have the same mind map or thinking process with you. But if they couldn’t understand your category and find the information they need, they will not stay longer. You always have to be considerate to the entry-level users.

The last step is to arrange the wireframe—what do you wish your layout to look like? As we learned from the class, too many meaningless pictures and auto-play flash are annoyed. This part has close relation with the user interface which we can find in next chapter.

The author also emphasizes the path and navigation of the web site. It will be helpful to focus on target users from creating user scenarios and persona. Finding their life styles will help web designers know their tastes and needs, which is an excellent way to communicate designers and users.