PERSONA: Shantele Wheeler 34 year old mother of 3, married $100,000 per year household income Shontele is a black, married mother of three boys, ages 12, 10, and 9. She earned an associate’s degree before getting married and having children. Shontele’s husband makes enough money to comfortably support the whole family. Shontele is a housewife that uses a Dell desktop computer running Windows XP in the home office. Shontele is an internet novice and primarily uses the web to look up recipes and check email. She does not tolerate slow load times, inline advertisements, spam, pop-up ads, ad-ware, viruses, or technical jargon. Shantele is ambivalent toward computers. She enjoys the availability of information and the ease of communication but, like many her age, she doesn’t trust what she doesn’t understand. Shantele fears that she will fall victim to scams, viruses, or identity theft just as the evening news reports about. Shantele wants to learn the technology so she can keep up with her kids’ conversations and habits. She also keeps in contact with her sister in Tulsa through email and receives pictures of her nieces and nephew. Shontele uses Google search for all of her data retrieval. Currently, her goals are to keep her family happy and improve upon her technical abilities. SCENARIO: DVDs for Christmas Shontele is looking to purchase DVDs online for Christmas. She is looking forward to taking advantage of discounted prices but is skeptical about making purchases online. Shontele wants to make sure that her identity and credit card information are secure. Her children like a wide variety of movies and she vaguely remembers the names of them. Shontele wants to avoid purchasing movies that contain violence, vulgarity, and sexual content. She “Googles” the term “DVD store” and chooses the first result. The online store seems reputable but she wants more information to be sure that the store is reputable. She likes being able to search for titles with the limited information she has, likes to read the reviews and ratings for each title, but does not care for expedited shipping since she is shopping well before Christmas. PERSONA: Sisi Zhang 22 year old college student $7500 per year from co-op Born in China, Sisi is a huge technophile, and is a senior at RIT. He especially loves gaming and everything in high-definition. He considers his friends to be his family since he lives far from home and doesn’t see his family very often. Sisi lives in an apartment with his friends who are also Computer Science majors. Sisi has a full merit-based scholarship and earns a modest income from his co-op position at Xerox. His desktop computer is self-built and very powerful. He dual-boots using Linux for his programming, chatting, and web-surfing, and using Windows XP for gaming. Sisi has been using computers since he was very young and is a go-to guy for computing advice. He has made a large number of purchases online and spends approximately four hours per day online. Sisi hates slow load times and clunky interfaces. He likes pages to be aesthetically pleasing and site interfaces to be highly intuitive and efficient. Sisi is a news junky and relies on sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and Engadget for all of his tech news, gossip, and reviews. Technology consumes Sisi’s life and he fully embraces new offerings. He has no loyalty to a single set of web sites but rather he goes to where the content is. Sisi uses his computer for work, pleasure, and school. Technology is an essential part of his life as well as his roommates’ lives. Recently, Sisi and his roommates chipped in to buy an XBOX 360, a Nintendo Wii, and a Playstation 3. They enjoy playing games and watching movies on the game consoles. Sisi hopes to graduate and work as a game developer at EA in California. As a Computer Science graduate at the top of his class, Sisi is expecting a handsome salary. He vows to always keep himself educated on new technology offerings and to pass his knowledge along to his kids once he settles down to have a family. SCENARIO: High-definition DVDs for next-generation consoles Sisi is looking to take advantage of his new consoles’ ability to play high definition movies at 1080p on the big screen projection TV in his apartment. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are new formats and he has heard mixed reviews about both. Sisi wants to find and receive titles quickly so he can try them out. He has heard a few opinions on certain movies but is largely unsure of what movies are worth buying. Critics’ ratings and user ratings are a key determinant in all of his online purchases so he looks for these when buying his DVDs. Sisi looks for SSL verifications, credit card acceptance, and expedited shipping. When making a purchase on a site that is new to him, Sisi also looks for ways of contacting the company if something goes wrong. PERSONA: David Chapman 33 year old businessman, father of 1, divorced $150,000 per year David is a successful businessman. He is white, travels often, and is a workaholic. Unfortunately, David’s work habits have cost him his marriage of four years and he has been divorced for 2 years. He has a five year old son that he sees every other weekend. David uses his company laptop and Blackberry constantly. He needs to be in constant contact with his company and clients. On flights, he prepares presentation slides for upcoming meetings and watches movies to pass time and relax. Though he uses his computer daily, David has only a general knowledge of computing and the internet. His pet peeves include slow load times, pop-up ads, and flashy splash intros. David likes his information to be readily accessible and vanilla. He has a love-hate relationship with technology. On one side, the technology is essential to his work but to the contrary, he wishes that he could take a vacation and leave his laptop and “Crackberry” behind. David uses the internet to keep informed about stock prices, sports scores, and business news. He also does his airline-bookings online and sends work-related email. David enjoys the financial tools offered by Yahoo! and reads news headlines through the Yahoo! portal. Search queries are likewise performed on the Yahoo! main page. David has always put his work first and hopes to be financially secure for the rest of his life as a result of his work ethic. He hopes to settle down again in a few years after gaining a few more promotions. David’s son is still a priority and David has recently re-entered the dating scene. SCENARIO: High-speed dad seeks high-speed DVD purchases David Chapman is looking to buy a variety of DVDs online. He wants to buy DVDs that he can watch with his young son, watch on the plane, and watch on dates. David is never in one place for more than three days so expedited shipping is a necessary feature. He chooses DVDs based on their cover then reads their summaries, MPAA ratings, and user ratings. He uses a credit card to make purchases and always spends the extra amount for next-day shipping. He expects his information to be secure, a confirmation email sent to his email address, and provision of a means of tracking the order. In the event that something goes wrong, David expects contact information to be readily available. The total amount of time he spends on making the purchases is less than ten minutes.