User Profiles
Many usability efforts seem to focus on a single user within a product. Focusing on the mythical single user ignores the larger environment where products are used. Enterprise-level applications involve several users who either interface directly with the product or support it. This user profile example describes a typical team using this product.
A typical product use case involved at least five users in various roles. These roles are outlined below.
Project Sponsors
Project sponsors are responsible for producing organizational value through the use of these technologies. These users knew the overall goals of the organization and worked at a strategic level to accomplish them.
Project sponsors partnered with other business units to understand how this technology could add value. Project sponsors often performed strategic work to obtain resources and funding for the project.
On occasion, Project Sponsors partnered with Subject Matter Experts to locate open source data (e.g. websites) and identify text samples to include or exclude in modeling activities. This involvement was rare, however, as these users preferred working in the management layers of the organization.
Project Sponsors were the ultimate consumers of application value, leveraging this value to drive other organizational goals. They rarely entered the application and actually used it.
Profile
- Background:
- Education:
- Age Range:
- Work Experience:
- Position Tenure:
- Business, non-technical
- 4+ years of college
- 40+ years old
- 10+ years
- 5+ years
Special Skills
- Mind-mapping
- Basic SQL query
- High political skills
Subject Matter Experts
Subject Matter Experts are individual contributors with senior levels of domain experience. These users know the most about the domain and the daily tasks necessary for accomplishing organizational goals at a tactical level.
Subject Matter Experts often gathered source materials (e.g. websites, internal documents, etc.) to provide examples for model builders to use during model-building tasks. These users knew roughly what to look for in text, but could not describe the linguistic attributes or features necessary to operationalize the capture of specific text passages. In other words, they had enough skills to find the neighborhood, but not the house. For low-risk, low-consequence domains, getting close was close enough.
Subject Matter Experts rarely spent time in the application, and generally consulted with Dedicated IT Resources during model building projects. Multiple Subject Matter Experts may contribute to a project.
Profile
- Background:
- Education:
- Age Range:
- Work Experience:
- Position Tenure:
- Domain-related
- 4+ years of college
- 35+ years old
- 10+ years
- 5+ years
Special Skills
- Tactical-level activities
- Limited linguistic analysis skills
General IT Resources
General IT Resources are responsible for installing and testing the application backend within the company’s IT infrastructure. They are frequently involved in pre-sales technical discussions and sales negotiations prior to purchase and installation. Post-sales and installation, they perform IT administration roles and ad hoc data-related services. These are tangential users of the application.
While these users are general resources available to all, they spend substantial time installing, configuring, testing, troubleshooting, and repairing application services that interface with the company’s technical environment. After product installation and administration, they use the product intermittently, generally at the API level, and only for administration or ad hoc data service tasks (extract, transform, load data tables, etc.).
General IT Resources are responsible for moving code into and out of production environments. These tasks occur after analytical model development, and are requested by Dedicated IT Resources. Although multiple General IT Resources may support the product, most project tasks will involve a single General IT contact.
Profile
- Background:
- Education:
- Age Range:
- Work Experience:
- Position Tenure:
- Engineering, Computer Science
- 4+ years of college
- 40+ years old
- 10+ years
- 10+ years
Special Skills
- IT Development
- IT Administration
- API Configuration
- Basic Data Wrangling
- Advanced SQL Queries
Dedicated IT Resources
Dedicated IT Resources are responsible for interfacing with General IT Resources, and for building and testing the analytical model. These users interface directly with the Project Sponsor for direction, and then work within the application to realize those goals. These are the primary users with deep investment in the application.
Building analytical models involves a series of development tasks using esoteric coding languages specific to text analytics. These users had to learn these languages in order to code the models, as well as the idiosyncrasies of the application before they could produce value. This required substantial investments in time and patience. This application was not intuitive, nor easy to use.
Depending on the organization and the business goals, several Dedicated IT Resources may work collaboratively on different aspects of the developing the model and moving it into production via General IT Resources.
Profile
- Background:
- Education:
- Age Range:
- Work Experience:
- Position Tenure:
- Engineering, Computer Science
- 2+ years of college
- 25+ years old
- 3+ years
- 2+ years
Special Skills
- IT Development
- IT Administration
- API Configuration
- Basic Data Wrangling
- Advanced SQL Queries
- High patience
- High frustration tolerance
Linguists
Linguists are specialized resources who work to understand language structure, composition, and nuance at the human cognitive level. Using this knowledge, they create taxonomies, data structures, and rules for operationalizing linguistic rules within an automated system; they teach machines the humanity of language recognition and interpretation.
Linguists are the target users for this application. These users have the skills necessary to build efficient, effective taxonomies that capture the nuance of language
with all the idiosyncrasies humans take for granted.
Linguistic resources were rare commodities, however, and only the most sophisticated and knowledgable organizations employed them. In some cases, Linguists were added on a project-specific basis, then released upon project completion. Project-specific use of Linguists limited the value of the application, since taxonomies and models did not mature and demonstrate full value over time.
When Linguists were added to the staff, the salary expense was offset by model accuracy and specificity; Linguists shortened development time and improved categorization accuracy. Since model results often informed expensive, long-term business decisions, model accuracy and specificity helped ensure data quality so that decisions were made using valid data.
Mature organizations with high investments in text analytics technologies employed multiple Linguists supporting different projects. Multiple Linguists may collaborate on taxonomies to ensure that rules are consistent across projects.
Profile
- Background:
- Education:
- Age Range:
- Work Experience:
- Position Tenure:
- Humanities, Languages
- 6+ years of college
- 35+ years old
- 5+ years
- 2+ years or contract resource
Special Skills
- Linguistic analysis
- Taxonomy planning
- Linguistic modeling languages
- Basic programming
Related Examples
Domain and Product Research
This example discusses what the product does, it’s history, and how it provides value within an organization. This information provides the reader with a background for understanding the other examples within this section.
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