In a planning meeting for creating our new topic-oriented workflows and processes as Agile user stories, we created a persona for what my role could be as a “Designer” of a new way to write information. Say, that’s me! It was entertaining to read about my persona. I share it with you in an attempt to describe what an information designer or architect role may be like. We’re using personae as a means to gather requirements for new tools and infrastructure for topic authoring with DITA. So here goes:
Designer – Let’s call her “Denise.”
She is an experienced writer, has likely been at BMC longer than 5 years. She’s independent so she might be hard to manage. (editor’s note: I beg to differ!) She’s your “Guru” writer, a leader/advocate/evangelist and power user. She’s an early adopter of most all technology and DITA and XML knowledgeable. She’s quite knowledgeable about the BMC infrastructure related to tech pubs. She likely has some lightweight development skills such as scripting and is tool-savvy. She’s innovation-focused, always looking for technology improvements, and a big picture person, which makes her process driven and organized.
Yes, indeed, I resemble that persona. And I didn’t even write this persona, a group of IT folks and writers wrote this persona. Very interesting to have a mirror of yourself written down, but boy, do I resemble these remarks.
XML editor evaluations related to DITA
We’re evaluating software tools for XML authoring and use cases and persona are a great way to start looking at how the future of techpubs will shape itself. It’s a similar approach to the authoring scenarios that Don Day advocates when evaluating DITA editors. I’ll write a few use cases that we’re considering for authors in another blog entry so stay tuned if you’re interested in evaluation methods for software programs.