Pat’s Point of View

My latest article has just been published, despite me being on a bit of baby leave. This latest one, Audience personas for the Macquarie University Library website, explores one of the key outcomes of a recent user research project I undertook, that is, a set of personas. Here’s a snippet of one persona:

Nicole the novice scholar

Nicole is an undergraduate student whose course requires a fair bit of research in the library. Students like Nicole, studying humanities and similar subjects, need to use a lot of academic material: books, reserve books and journals as well as media and the internet. However, Nicole is not well equipped for this kind of work when she arrives at university and is unfamiliar with information systems or research strategies.

It was interesting that the existing view of the library audience was that held by many academic institutions—I have had some exposure to other libraries and universities—and while it is fairly logical, it doesn’t really help in terms of designing a website. So the segmentation and prioritisation I recommended was quite different; rather than lumping all undergraduates together I followed the natural ‘fault lines’ in library usage to split these students into groups that make it easier to design and deliver online library services.

In contrast, I found that many ‘higher degree’ students and academic staff were very similar in terms of their library skills and information needs. Thus there is no need to distinguish between them (even though there might be 20 years of experience and respect between a senior lecturer and a masters’ student). It was all about context, we were segmenting and profiling the audience for the purpose of designing a website, and other online services.

As always, all feedback welcome.

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