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As a human-usable software, Magnolia should try address those expectations accordingly, taking care that the most important requirements of a specific type of user are met. Thus the goal of this article is to provide a common understanding of the target users' skills and characteristics (as well as a common vocabulary) for developers and decision-makers so that, in the end, the users expectations drive any user interface related decision. Realizing this is part of the so called user-centered design process. A strongly user-centered design approach leads to a much better quality of the software regarding usability aspects. User Roles And Their Characteristics

User Profiles: User Roles And Their Characteristics

User Roles

The few examples given above already showed that there are users with different roles. Basically, for the Magnolia AdminCentral application I want to distinguish four different roles: editor, publisher, administrator and developer. We will discuss those roles later in this article but let me quickly provide an overview of them:

• Editor/Author:
  An editor is someone creating and managing content on a webpage. An editor might also be responsible for creating new pages, thus maintaining the structure of a customer's website (or at least part of it, e.g. the part of the website belonging to the editor's department).
• Publisher/Manager:
  A publisher is someone that is responsible for reviewing and approving content provided by authors before it becomes public. I'd like to refer to them also as "(information) manager" because those people sometimes are also responsible for maintaining the global structure of a website, that is e.g. cross-department pages or the general site structure. However, even though managers might be concerned with structure, the do not create content themself (if so, we say that they slip into the role of an editor).
• Administrator:
  Apart from those people involved in a website development that create and manage the content and structure of a site there exist people that maintain the web business technically, people in the role of an administrator. An administrator is e.g. responsible for setting up the deployment of a website, ensuring certain security policies and taking care of the overall system's health. Administrators do not make use of any content editing feature of the CMS.
• Developer:
  Someone who is configuring the CMS to fit the customer's needs and who is implementing the customer's technical requirements is considered to be in the role of a developer. A developer is usually not in touch with the public stage of a website at all and uses the CMS' editing/security capabilities only for test purposes.

Of course, there might be more roles involved for large-scale companies (e.g. like a special translater role for enterprises operating in different countries) however I consider those as more specific roles of the basic ones and thus not explicitly mentioned here.

User Profiles

So far, you should have recognized that I only talked about a user's tasks - the "what" he's doing with the system. But there is definitely more to say about the user of a software system. For example "who" exactly or "when" and "how often" is he performing a specific tasks. These questions don't target the user's tasks but his skills and characteristics.

Especially the characteristics we're interested in from a usability point of view are:

• Usage frequency:
  The usage frequency gives an insight about how often a user uses a software system. We simply distinguish between frequently (e.g. daily or two days a week) and sporadically (that is maybe periods of some weeks between system access).
• Usage intensity:
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• Application domain knowledge:
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• the four roles: editor, manager, administrator, developer
• basic characteristics: the user-roles matrix
  • factors: usage intensity, usage frequency, application domain knowledge
    • "(side) note"/excursion: the 7 principles of interaction design => pointer to next article
    • relationship to basic principles of interaction design
  • note that usage frequency of course depends on update frequency of web content (up-to-dateness of web site)
  • application domain knowledge: actually separate two different things: knowledge about Magnolia (CMSs) and company/commercial websites

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