Envisioning Users (User Profiles)

What is a User Profile?

A user profile is a realistic (but likely fictional) example of a target audience member. The profile commonly takes the form of a one page piece that lists the user’s name, occupation, education, demographic characteristics, computer/web experience, and site goals or likely tasks. A stock photography picture is usually used to give a face to the profile.

For a example:

And even that can be represented as a diagram as we did in our lectures.

Name	Sara Singh
Age	40 Years
Gender	Female
Marital status	Married and Having a child of six years.
Interests	Movies, music, shopping and reading
Languages	English as the first language. Since she is addicted to French movies, she is fluent in French.
Educational Level	BSc (Hon) in Information Technology and MSc in Project Management.
Expertise	Project management, Risk management, and Information analysis technologies
Skills	Good analytically and numeracy skills Project management software and more ICT skills (including word processing, e-mail and collaboration systems).
Visual ability	Normal visual ability
Work Experience	5 years of working experience as project manager.
Responsibilities in their post	Management of IT projects in the company. Motivating employees to work with a target of a deadline. Responsible for facilitating communication among stakeholders. Monitoring status of projects. Supervising progress and assigning resources to each project.

A user profile should include

1. Name
2. Occupation
3. Age
4. Gender
5. Education
6. Computing and Web experience
7. Personal Web behavior patterns (how do they use the Web in their personal time)
8. How they will use the site
9. Any additional site specific demographics (e.g. a Newspaper site might find lifestyle, location, race, etc. important)
10. Stock photo (putting a face to a name)

It’s important to make sure your personas accurately describe the target (or existing) audiences. They should be based on your current understanding of existing users (if they exist), research, user interviews, and the knowledge of content experts and clients.