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Following the introductory article about the interaction design process of the Magnolia GenUIne development project, I want to continue with the analysis and discuss different "profiles" of users working with the new Magnolia 4.0 AdminCentral. I will present different so called "personas", each of them describing a specific group of users with unique characteristics. In order to discuss and evaluate further design aspects, particularly usability, it is important to understand and remember the characteristics of these different "personas". The main purpose of this article is to inform developers of what they need to keep in mind when implementing the new Magnolia 4.0 AdminCentral interface.
There are quite different people working with Magnolia : some of them use it every day as developers, in very different roles. Some use Magnolia daily as developers while others only sporadically access Magnolia when they are actively updating some content on the their website. Those These different users have pretty much very different performance expectations to the sofware, different requirements and different skills and requirements for the software. Additionally, different users have very different skill-levels in working with Magnolia.
For instance, an editor who is 0working a web content editor working with Magnolia for the first time won't will not benefit much from strong customizability from the robust and flexible customization options of the interface but instead would Magnolia interface. The web content editor would instead appreciate a clean , simple-to-use interface and additionally providing little help information. This in turn is not of primary interest for an advanced developer working with Magnolia for a long time. He instead, would like and intuitively simple user interface that provides useful "help" information for the level at which he or she is using the software.
These end-user level features of simplicity, ease of use and readily available user help are not of much use for an advanced developer who may want to access advanced configuration options of for Magnolia with only a few mouse-clicks fast and efficient. But there is also the administrator, who might in an efficient and rapid way.
In addition to these two example users, there may also be an administrator who may not work with Magnolia oftenly but requires often but when he does, he must have effective and reliable features, tools and functionality for non-trivial tasks like setting up such as setting, maintaining and changing security configurations.
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. This is why usability experts claim: "know the user"!
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