CSE 490ra Group Assignment 2: Persona and Scenarios Assignment
Due: April 22nd,  Scenarios can be turned in April 24th

For this assignment your group will develop the scenarios and personas that will guide the design and implementation of your Tablet PC Application.  Each group will construct one user persona that represents their primary user and at least 1 scenarios of how the persona will use your application to do a desired task.  

Your persona and scenarios will be submitted as a website on your group's project webspace. Both the persona and the scenarios are part of the portfolio your group is building and will be included in the demo at the final project presentations.  With this in mind, feel free to be creative, but make sure that the persona's goals are well specified and the scenarios are well thought out.

Once again we recommend that each person works individually to come up with a persona and some scenarios BEFORE the group meets.

Turnin details:  One group member should email the webpage(s) containing your persona and scenarios to the instructors.  Each group member must individually email the answers to the  reflective questions to the instructors.  Make sure that everything submitted clearly has your names on it (include your last name or group number in the title of any attachments).

Related Reading:
1. "Personas: Practice and Theory"  by John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin.  This article lists the types of information included in personas at Microsoft and describes how they are used during product development.  John Pruitt will be giving a guest lecture on Personas in class on April 17th.

2. About Face, Chapters 5 and 6.

Persona (Due April 22nd)

Your persona must include:

• A name
• A picture or pictures. Find a friend and borrow a digital camera (AJ has one if needed)
• Goals:  What does this person want to do? 
  Cooper's nice way of differentiating goals from tasks is that goals stay the same even if the technology changes. For example, I will still need to grade homework even if it is submitted via electronically instead of on paper. *** This is a critical part of your persona ***
• Background about computer skills and abilities.  How much experience does your persona have with computers? How often does he/she use them?
• Personal Background,  How old is your persona,  In school? Working? Does he/she have a family, What does he/she do when not working?
• A description of a day in the life:  Outline a typical day for your persona.
• Additional Reference:  One report, news article, market research report that your group used to gather additional data to inform your persona design. 
• Other... additional details that seem helpful for understanding your persona.

Scenarios  (These can be turned in by Thursday April 24th)

Your group needs to come up with at least 1 well thought out context scenario [Cooper, About Face, pg 80]. The scenario should describe the persona's use of the software from start to finish to give a feeling for the breadth.

Alan Cooper describes scenarios as "a concise description of a persona using a software-based product to achieve a goal" [Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, pg 179].  Another way to think about scenarios is like a good demo script for your final presentation.  It is important that the scenario focus on how the persona uses the software and not on listing out every feature it has. 

For example, a simple scenario for using the Window Journal Tablet PC program might be "A.J. arrives at the meeting and opens a new journal document for the meeting.  As she writes notes she makes work items clear by highlighting them in yellow. Halfway through the meeting she adds the title "Meeting Notes" to her journal note and saves it in her "My Notes" directory.  At the end of the meeting she publishes the notes so she can share them with the other participants".  (Your scenarios will be longer)

Note, you will be able to iterate and refine your scenarios based on feedback from the instructors and as you learn more about your users, but it is very important that you think hard about how your persona will use your application.