Web developer personas (are you in there?)
Nov 21, 2012 15:53 · 265 words · 2 minute read
User personas are a useful tool for when you want to discuss needs that users have and, ultimately, features that meet those needs. Personas help keep you talking about real people versus some random “user”.
I’d like to build up a collection of web developer personas that we can use in our product and feature planning. The idea is that each persona will represent a (largely)1{#refmark-1.fn-ref-mark} distinct collection of web developers. We can use these personas when we’re crafting product requirements, though we will likely need to customize them to properly describe specific kinds of problems we’re trying to solve.
Are you a web developer? If so, please take a quick look at the initial set of personas I’ve created and let me know if none of these would be able to reflect the workflows and tools you use regularly.
- There’s actually quite a bit of overlap in terms of tools that different web developers regularly use, but there is also a wide range of workflows and a wide variety of tools at the edges. For example, almost everyone uses browser-based styling tools for making tweaks to their styles. But, for editing their CSS files, people use all kinds of different editors. Some people might use the ReCSS bookmarklet to reload their CSS automatically. Others use LESS or SASS with some kind of build step before they preview their pages. This variety is part of the reason it’s helpful to have some representative personas and talk in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish, rather than how they do it.↵