Modeling users and their goals

Most software is built to serve people in some way. And, for those products, the success of the software is often judged by the people who use it. In many cases the primary users of software work with it to support other people. The quality of experience for those secondary users will also be affected by the software.

Capturing what we understand about those users to target and validate our choices of functionality will allow us to make successful choices. This section discusses various user models to give names to and contain information about all those important people to satisfy.

Part of understanding users is looking a little closer at where they're using the software and the tools they currently use to meet their needs. If they work for an organization purchasing the software, and organization other than yours, we'll need to understand that organization and what motivates their purchase of the software.

We're leveraging all this information to understand the context our product will occupy. We'll use this as a design target - a target to aim for when making decisions about our solution.

1. User models distilled (D 4/19/2007)
2. Create an actor goal list (I 3/15/2007)
3. Create a user role model (I 4/3/2007)
4. Profile a user (I 3/15/2007)
5. Personify a profiled user (I 3/15/2007)