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User Profiles: User Roles And Their Characteristics
User Roles
The few examples given above already showed described 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 these roles in more detail 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 webpageweb page. 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 they do not create content themself (if so, we say that they slip into the role of an editor)themselves, and if they do, they are essentially performing in the role of Editor/Author rather than that of Publisher/Manager. - Administrator:
Apart from those people involved in a website development that create and manage the These are the people who are generally separate from the website development and content and structure side of a site there exist people that . The people in this role maintain the web business technically, . These people in are performing the role of an administrator. An administrator is e.g. responsible for setting up administrators. Administrators may be responsible for the deployment of a website, ensuring certain security policies and taking care of are integrated and maintained and that the overall web system is maintained according to the specific organization's healthpolicies and needs. Administrators do not make use of any content editing feature features 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 generally not in touch concerned with the content or public stage of a website at all and uses the CMS' editing/security capabilities only for test purposes .to ensure that the functionality of what they have developed will perform consistently when it is deployed.
Large-scale companies may well have users performing different specific roles that use or interface with the Magnolia system in some way. For instance, multilingual sites may have translators whose primary purpose is recreating existing content pages in a particular different language, requiring them to perform some of the functions of the Editor/Author or even Publisher/Manager but with specific focus for their unique role in their organization. On the other end of the spectrum, smaller companies may have a single person who performs several of these articulated roles. In order to communicate these user roles and the vocabulary needed to continue with the user-centric development approach, I will discuss these four roles only although most readers can understand that both larger and smaller companies will be able to customize their understanding and interpretation of these roles according to the specific details of their organizationsOf course, there might be more roles involved for large-scale companies (e.g. like a special translater role for enterprises operating in different countries with multi-lingual sites). However, I consider those as more specific roles of the basic ones and thus not explicitly mention them here.
User Characteristics
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.
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