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Those basic characteristics of a user have a direct impact on the importance certain usability aspects. As you'll see in more detail in the next post there are seven important usability principles, namely suitability for learning, self descriptiveness, error tolerance, conformity with user expectations, suitability for the task, controllability and suitable for individualisation. As the table below depicts, the application domain knowledge for instance has a strong impact on the suitability for learning. For a layman user it is important that he get's enough help information at hands to be able to quickly work with the system. On the other hand for a user that frequently works with a system it is more important to allow him to customize the user interface, e.g. to setup keyboard shortcuts for certain oftenly used commands. For the Magnolia AdminCentral application it counts both applies equally, the target audience of the Magnolia CMS ranges from sporadic users to frequent users and from laymen to experts. However, for some features it is more important to keep them primarily simple, for other features it is more important to design them as powerful as possible. Therefor, in future posts I will point to the users characteristics given above whenever I explain a new feature or an enhancement for an existing one.

Now that you know there are different 

• 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

User Profiles And Personas

If we combine the basic characteristics from the last section with the roles of users working with Magnolia which we discussed before we get something that I refer to as user profiles. For example "an editor with medium application domain knowledge, that uses Magnolia frequently but only basic editing features" describes a user profile. User roles and the basic characteristics for their own are too coarse grained, but a user profile describes a specific group of users detailed enough to discuss various features from a usability point of view in a meaningful manner.

Following, we will discuss the most relevant user profiles in more detail. Additionally I will present a persona for each profile accordingly. A persona is a kind of portfolio of a concrete but fictitious person that represents a specific profile. Personas are simple to remember and the described characters shall be easy to identify with. You can print them, pin them on your board and you'll (hopefully) remember them whenever you take any design related decision. As you can see, there are different roles of users (e.g. "editor", "administrator", "developer" to name a few) but all of t