User Persona and Audience Learning Curve

An exercise for creating a sample user persona and plotting an audience learning curve for the user.

“The seasoned software developer”

This is a user who is a software engineer looking to integrate a fictional API analytics software product into their own system.

software developer

Name: Rob Parker
Age: 30 years
Education: Bachelor’s degree
Location: San Francisco, CA

About

This user persona, Rob, is a representative of the target audience for consuming the services offered by a fictional API analytics software product. He works as a senior software engineer who codes back end programs at a user-facing, consumer software company that helps users with housing services. He needs to utilize third-party software services like the fictional API analytics product to view API metrics and generate reports on the APIs he has developed. The fictional API analytics product provides its own APIs to be integrated with their customers’ systems.

Goals and Needs

To be able to find how to start using the services in the form of APIs from the analytics product.
To be able to find a list of APIs and their functions offered by the analytics product.
To know the versions and specifications of each API, their parameters, responses, error codes, and error messages.
To be able to search for context-sensitive information.
To be able to debug issues in an easy way.
To be able to access new release information in a timely manner.

Motivations

To integrate the third-party software endpoints into his own service and start using the products with minimum hassle.
To be able to get reliable and accurate responses from the third-party software, with no downtime and latency.
To be able to debug any issues when integrating with the API analytics product.
To have the third-party software service work successfully with his own service to give desired results for achieving the goals of his own service.

Frustrations

Encountering disorganized documentation that’s hard to read and understand.
Spending time tracking missing information.
Wasting time with the basics, instead of getting task-specific information.
Viewing discrepancies in the documented APIs and actual functioning of the APIs.
Not being given enough troubleshooting related knowledge.

Everyday Activities

Working in an Agile environment with product managers and design/UX experts and frontend engineers.
Writing back end software code involving APIs.
Writing tests for the code.
Troubleshooting errors.
Analyzing system performance.

Device Usage

Laptop
Mobile phone