Outline:

• Intro
  • article explains user roles working with the Magnolia Admin Central
  • scope of this article: interface design trail, analysis
  • motivation for this article
    • users have different expectations, requirements and skills: "simple-to-use" vs. "available advanced configuration options"
    • the GUI should address those expectations accordingly, rating the realized features by the most important requirements of the appropriate user
  • outcome/goal of this article
    • the developers need to keep the user group and their skills in mind when designing and implementing a feature; this article should sensiblize the developer for the users' characteristics ("know the user")
    • definitive personas are developed to remember user roles
• User Roles And Their Characteristics
  • 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
• Details about each role
  • "(side) note"/excursion: personas; about personas in general: should be a (relatively) simple to remember conclusion; "simple to identify with"
  • the editor/author role
    • typical tasks of this user-role
      • creating and editing pages/contents
      • organizing content (uploading, moving etc.)
      • scope: website, documents, data
      • not concerning about configuration, security, deployment etc.
  • differentiate two different scenarios: call them "editor" (sporadic) and "author" (regularily)
    • the role ultimately depends on size of company using Magnolia and business goal of website (e.g. a news site's editor frequently uses Magnolia, however a secretary of a little 10 people non-IT-company doesn't)
    • explain the basic characteristics
      • "editor": layman, little experience;
        • layman in developing websites (programming, technical details about the web)
        • little experience in using web-based software especially web content management systems (web based systems have their characteristics, e.g. server delay/response times; no desktop software regarding e.g. keyboard behavior, you have to "upload" stuff, no tabs available etc.; normally not concerned with distributed, concurrent working)
        • usage intensity: low
          • only make use of Magnolia's basic editing capabilities
        • usage frequency: sporadically
          • not dedicated person in a small company/department; website where content doesn't change much
        • application domain knowledge****** company website: substantial knowledge of pages and their contents at least of the departments part of the site, since daily working with/communicating it
          • CMS (e.g. knowledge about the range of the CMS' feature-set): none, e.g. virtual URIs etc. likely won't be a word in the editors's vocabulary; whereas basic web vocabularies like "link" are
        • relationship to 7 principles: self-descriptiveness, expectation conformance, failure tolerance, learning support
        • persona: "Edward, the EDitor"
      • "author": medium experience
        • usage frequency: high
          • oftenly dedicated person in a company/department/team; this is the case when web content updates frequently, e.g. an author of a news site
          • creates/edits a large amount of content
        • usage intensity: medium/high
          • uses Magnolia's editing features only, however, those intensively
        • application domain knowledge****** company website: substantial knowledge of a certain set of pages and their contents (e.g. the departments part of the site) since he is daily working with it/communicating it
          • CMS: knows editing capabilites only, however those intensively
        • persona: "Antony 'Tony' the author"
  • the manager role
    • role comes up for its own only in bigger companies or at least companies with many editors (such as news sites with many authors)
    • explain the basic characteristic
      • usage intensity: medium experience;
        • normally, managers have been shifted from some degree, thus it's very likely that they have been working as editors before for a longer time. Thus they a
    • persona: "Mark the MAnager"
  • the administrator role
    • persona: "Andy the ADmin"
  • the developer role
    • persona: "Daniel the DEveloper"

• What's next?
  • next article(s) will discuss principles of interaction design and their consequences as well as general usability and business goals
  • invitation to the developers: print the personas and never forget them

Serving Different Users Needs: Magnolia GenUIne's User Profiles Explained

Following the introductive article about the interaction design trail 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 outlining a specific group of users with special characteristics. To know, understand and remember those characteristics are a key factor when discussing and rating further design decisions regarding various usability aspects. The purpose of this article is mainly to sensitize the developers of what they have to keep in mind when implementing the new interface.

There are quite different people working with Magnolia: some of them use it every day as developers, others only sporadically access Magnolia when updating some content on the website. Those users have pretty much different expectations to the sofware, different requirements and different skills in working with Magnolia. For instance, an editor who is 0working with Magnolia for the first time won't benefit much from strong customizability options of the interface but instead would 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 to access advanced configuration options of Magnolia with only a few mouse-clicks fast and efficient. But there is also the administrator, who might not work with Magnolia oftenly but requires effective and reliable features for non-trivial tasks like setting up 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"!

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 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.

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

• Usage frequency:
  The usage frequency indicates 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:
  The usage intensity indicates how intensively a user is using the software. A user uses a software intensively if he uses the majority of features available to perform his tasks. In contrast to those users a user works with a software only facile if he only uses the basic capabilities of a software.
• Application domain knowledge:
  The application domain knowlege describes the users experience with the software. A layman might have never been working with a CMS or even doesn't know that such systems exist whereas an expert user knows the application area of a CMS well since he has been in touch with those systems for a long time.

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 commands. For the Magnolia AdminCentral application it counts both, 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

As you can see, there are different roles of users (e.g. "editor", "administrator", "developer" to name a few) but all of t