Applying personas

Applying personas Just last week we were having a meeting where the subject of personas came up. This may have been blogged about in the past... but... we have three primary personas across the developer division: Mort, Elvis and Einstein.

Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems and focuses on productivity and learn as needed. Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learn while working on the solution. Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution. In a way, these personas have helped guide the design of features during the Whidbey product cycle.

The description above is only rough summarization of several characteristics collected and documented by our usability folks. During the meeting a program manager on our team applied these personas in the context of server controls rather well (I think), and thought I should share it. Mort would be a developer most comfortable and satisfied if the control could be used as-is and it just worked. Elvis would like to able to customize the control to get the desired behavior through properties and code, or be willing to wire up multiple controls together. Einstein would love to be able to deeply understand the control implementation, and want to be able to extend it to give it different behavior, or go so far as to re-implement it.

Its definitely an interesting challenge to cater to the wide spectrum of developers, while managing the complexity and size of the feature. The set of security-related server controls: Login, PasswordRecovery, LoginView, CreateUserWizard, and ChangePassword (the latter two being new additions since the PDC) present a good case study in how a feature can scale to different user types. All of these controls just work out of the box in implementing the end-to-end scenario of managing user sign-on. Coupled with themes, these controls can look pretty good as well. They go on to provide a whole set of properties to tweak their behavior, and appearance. Furthermore, they provide the ability to flip into template mode for more significant changes to their content and layout. Finally, they're built on the provider-model in ASP.NET so an advanced developer could come along and swap out the built-in membership provider going against say the default SQL or Active Directory user database and replace it with one that goes against say an Oracle user database or some other custom store while keeping the UI functionality intact.

I would be curious to hear if others have made similar observations about other features in the framework...