General

Andy Petroff was drawn from the set of profiles developed during the 2005 redesign (including his photo.) Other four persona photos are royalty free purchased from Dreamstime stock photos website and their profiles were created from data collected in a survey that included the following questions:

1) Describe your personal demographics.

What is their profession? Household income? Are they married? What’s their annual household income? Where do they live? What is their gender? How old are they? Do they have children?

2) Educational background.

What level of education did they complete? Which schools did they attend, and what did they study?

3) Career path.

How did they end up where they are today? Did they major in a subject that’s very similar to or very different from their current role? Has their career track been pretty traditional, or did they switch from another industry?

4) In which industry or industries does your company work?

Role

5) What is your job role? Your title?

How long have they had this role and title? Are they an individual contributor, or do they manage other people?

6) Whom do you report to? Who reports to you?

7) How is your job measured?

8) What does a typical day look like?

What time do they get to work and what time do they leave? What do they do when they’re most productive? What’s their “busy work” look like? Include both the tasks they do for their job, as well as what happens during the day outside their job. Are they spending more time at work or at home? Where would they rather be? What do they like to do for fun? Who are the people in their life that matter most? What kind of car do they drive? Pets? Clothes?

9) Which skills are required to do your job?

If they were hiring someone to replace them and had to write a job description of what’s actually required, what would it say? What are the ideal skills for this job, and how good is your persona at each of them? Where did they learn these skills? Did they learn them on the job, at a previous job, or by taking a course?

10) What knowledge and which tools do you use in your job?

Which applications and tools do they use every single day? Every week?

##Goals

11) What are you responsible for?

What’s their primary goal at work? What about their secondary goal? Knowing these will help you learn what you can do to help your persona achieve their goals and overcome their challenges.

12) What does it mean to be successful in your role?

What can you do to make your personas look good? Take the time to understand what makes your personas successful for more effective communications.

Watering Holes

13) How do you learn about new information for your job?

14) Which publications or blogs do you read?

15) Which associations and social networks do you participate in?

Accessibility

16) Web accessibility

Do you have family, self, or friends with disability? Does it impact their ability to use technology? Rating scale 1 – 10 awareness of web accessibility. Do you need to know more about it for your job?

17) WAI site

Do they use it? Why? How often, where do they go? Do they send others? If so where do they send others? If not why not? Do they subscribe to any lists, activities at WAI?

We want to solve problems for our target audience. How do problems affect their day-to-day life? How do those problems make them feel.