Mobile Personas: The Power User

A couple of months ago, I found myself outside the office, running both personal and business errands. I still needed to be connected, but I didn't have my laptop with me. And, surprisingly, I didn't need it. My smart phone, a Palm Pre, had everything that I needed and wanted in order to accomplish my goals.

I left work that morning to go to an off-site meeting. I wasn't sure where it was, so I opened Google Maps, entered the address, and got a set of directions by using my current GPS location as the starting point. While driving, I got onto a conference call (with my Bluetooth headset) to work with our developers on some questions they had about a user story. During the off-site meeting, I received a text message from a good friend of mine reminding me that the pre-sale for a particular concert we wanted to go to would be over in 30 minutes. After the meeting, I opened the Pre's web browser, went to the venue's web site, and purchased two tickets. I started the FaceBook application and let everyone know that tickets were in (virtual) hand.

That was the point when I realized that things had changed for me. From notification to purchase to sharing the information, I had been able to do it all while completely mobile. There was a distinct sense of freedom at that point.

For the rest of the day, in between the remaining errands, I regularly checked my work email to make sure that everything was going smoothly. I also logged on to AIM just to be fully available to the developers. And before heading back to the office, I checked my calendar one more time to make sure I knew what that night's plans were.

I'd fully entered the mobile age, and I was there as a power user.

Mobile Personas

Personas are artificial constructs that help product owners, architects, and designers extrapolate how users will interact with applications. The goal is to create a detailed profile that represents a type of user. These profiles capture expected behaviors, specific qualities or characteristics, and pre-dispositions or biases of that user type. To humanize users, personalities are intertwined with the personas, often including actual names, pictures, and biographies.

Developing strong personas is a part of the design phase. Research (in the form of metrics or interviews), thoughtfulness, and review are important tools in creating functional personas. Doing so will provide many returns during the later development phase. Developers will have a better understanding of users, and when decisions are made, they are more likely to be the right decisions for that user type. QA engineers will have a better understanding of the users they are attempting to emulate, which will increase the quality of the testing as they take on the behaviors and patterns of the users.

Mobile personas are emerging as an important and distinct sub-set of Internet culture. They are related to the current Internet power user persona but differ in several significant ways. In fact, the ways in which they differ really harken back to the power user of a decade ago, when our biggest challenges were bandwidth and limitations of displays. For those who have been working in the Internet industry for awhile, then, it's that whole adage that "everything old is new again".

Understanding the Power User

The following are some thoughts and suggestions for creating and incorporating the mobile power user persona.

Key characteristics of the mobile power user:

• Is on the go ... a lot.
• Wants to be free but still connected.
• Wants to be able to do everything on the smart phone.
• Wants everything to be fast, fast, fast.

Key challenges of the mobile persona:

• Limitations of the technology -- some smart phones still don't offer Flash or deal well with sophisticated JavaScript.
• Bandwidth -- transmit speeds are still a problem with mobile devices, and worse yet, it creates an impression of slowness from the device, application, the web site, etc. ... even if it's undeserved.
  
• Coverage -- tunnels are the bane of my existence, but then so is being in rural areas or anywhere outside of coverage.
  

Strategies for engaging the mobile persona:

• Quick, efficient, and minimalist design.
  
• Store off-line (on the device) as much as possible. It will create the appearance of speed if the application doesn't have to make or sustain one or more connections to the Internet.
  
• Is willing to pay for applications, but only if they're cheap and offer clear value. Demonstrate that value early and often.
  
• Offer a mobile version of a web site, but only if that mobile version is as fully featured as the original web site. Stripped down mobile sites that don't allow smart phone users to use the original web site offer no value and create frustration and a bad experience.