you will write three personas to prepare for writing assignment #2, the set of instructions that explain how to accomplish a task on a website. You want to read the instructions for writing assignment #2 before writing your personas.
Follow the attach instructions to complete this work.
2024_rubric_WA1:personas Course: WRTG 393 6363 Advanced Technical Writing (2248)
Criteria Complete 5 points
Incomplete 2.5 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
The three
personas
feature a
summary,
including the
persona's name,
occupation,
location, and
age.
/ 5
Criteria Complete 4 points
Incomplete 2 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
The website for
which writing
assignment #2
will be written is
provided.
/ 4
Criteria Complete 10 points
Incomplete 5 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
8/12/24, 2:43 PM Writing Assignment #1 — Three Personas – WRTG 393 6363 Advanced Technical Writing (2248) – UMGC Learning Management Sy…
https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/lms/dropbox/user/folder_submit_files.d2l?db=1696186&grpid=0&isprv=0&bp=0&ou=1249229 1/3
Total / 50
Criteria Complete 10 points
Incomplete 5 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
The three
personas
feature the
goals for each
persona–why
the persona
would want to
accomplish the
task.
/ 10
Criteria Complete 16 points
Incomplete 8 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
The three
personas show
appropriate pain
points or unique
situations that
each persona
might face in
following the
instructions.
/ 16
Criteria Complete 15 points
Incomplete 7.5 points
Absent 0 points
Criterion Score
Language
choices for the
personas
feature the
following:
/ 15Language has only
minor
grammar/readabili
ty problems
Language has
major
grammar/readabili
ty problems
8/12/24, 2:43 PM Writing Assignment #1 — Three Personas – WRTG 393 6363 Advanced Technical Writing (2248) – UMGC Learning Management Sy…
https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/lms/dropbox/user/folder_submit_files.d2l?db=1696186&grpid=0&isprv=0&bp=0&ou=1249229 2/3
Overall Score
Level 3 40 points minimum
Level 2 20 points minimum
Level 1 0 points minimum
8/12/24, 2:43 PM Writing Assignment #1 — Three Personas – WRTG 393 6363 Advanced Technical Writing (2248) – UMGC Learning Management Sy…
https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/lms/dropbox/user/folder_submit_files.d2l?db=1696186&grpid=0&isprv=0&bp=0&ou=1249229 3/3
,
Writing Assignment Report to Your Supervisor
Summary of the Assignment: • Task: In this assignment, you will write a short report to the owner of a company to which you
have just been hired.
• Length: 1500-2000 words.
• Graphics: You must integrate at least one graphic
• Sources: You will integrate at least three sources into the report.
The Situation and Your Role In It You have been hired for the position of Manager for Customer Service at Forrest Lawn Services, a
landscaping company.
Forrest Lawn maintains a robust business in landscaping both residential and business properties. The
company has many clients in the local DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) area.
The landscaping staff that services residential and business properties comprises 75 individuals. In
addition, the company has several staff working in its office in Landover, Maryland. Included among
these office staff members is the IT Department, which consists of 10 employees.
The growth of the company has led to some problems that concern you as a new employee.
The History of Forrest Lawn Services
Some history on the company will help to explain the problems Forrest Lawn has now.
Forrest Lawn started off in 2010 as a small outfit, owned and operated by Richard Smith. Richard grew
up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He graduated from high school and took a few courses at a local
community college. He never graduated from the community college but instead, after completing 18
credits, decided to leave school to start a landscaping business.
Richard started off the business with one truck, three lawn mowers, and a few helpers. He operated the
business out of his house. Eventually, as the number of clients grew, so did the number of trucks, lawn
mowers, and pieces of equipment. He added new employees to assist with the landscaping.
Richard eventually leased office space in Landover in order to have a more professional and scalable base
from which to operate the company. In addition, as the company grew and its office staff grew, so did the
technology and IT needs.
For the IT needs of the company, Richard took several steps. He hired a web developer, Sandra Davidson,
to develop a website for Forrest Lawn. Sandra used WordPress as the platform. Richard later hired Jack
Johnson to develop and maintain a database of customers, past and present. The database includes
personal information on the customers, such as physical addresses, email addresses, and, for some, credit
card information.
Eventually, Richard hired a few more IT employees, all of whom persuaded Richard to put the company’s
database on the cloud instead of purchasing an expensive server to maintain in the office. Richard agreed.
The company then contracted with CloudCorps, a local cloud company.
The IT Department grew as the company grew. Marsha Nolton was later hired. She maintains the
company blog, also on WordPress, but with a different account from that of the website. The blog is an
effective marketing tool. It provides weekly updates on services, deals, and other information on the
company. In addition, other functions began to involve IT. Jared Stone was hired to run payroll for
Forrest Lawn. With Jared’s input, the payroll information was put on the cloud. CloudCorps maintains all
payroll information on its servers.
Problems That Have Developed
Richard, in hiring the IT staff and organizing the department, was not privy to best practices in security in
the area of IT. As a result, some problems have developed.
For example, only Jack has access to the database of past and present clients. Jack logs into the system
with an ID and password that CloudCorps has provided him. This is not an ideal situation. If Jack were to
experience a medical emergency and become unavailable for a period of time, no one else at Forrest
Services would have access to the database. If Jack were to leave the company, no one else at Forrest
Services would be able to perform his duties. In addition, CloudCorps has a company policy that forbids
it to provide login or password information to anyone other than approved individuals. The only approved
individual now is Jack.
Moreover, Sandra maintains the website through WordPress. She uses her personal email and password to
log into the system. But she is the only individual in the office who has access to or is able to update
anything on the website. Again, if anything were to happen to Sandra, Forrest Lawn would be stuck. No
one else in the company can update its website.
Marsha manages the company’s blog, also on WordPress. The blog is an excellent marketing tool, with
weekly updates on services, deals, and other information on the company posted weekly. However,
Marsha is the sole maintainer of the blog. No one else at Forrest Glenn has access to the blog to update it.
Jared runs payroll. Like the others, he is the only individual with any access to the payroll records.
Because the records are also on CloudCorps, if something were to happen to Jack, no options are
available for anyone else in the company to access the payroll records.
Overall, Forrest Lawn grew at a rapid pace. Richard Smith applied excellent management skills in
growing the landscaping business. However, Richard needs help in establishing responsible IT personnel
policies for the company. Richard has no background in this area.
Richard is not aware of the problem the current arrangement poses.
Your Concern About the Situation
As a new hire at Forrest Lawn, you have observed this situation, and you are concerned. The current
arrangement leaves the company in a very vulnerable situation if one of these individuals experiences a
medical emergency or has to leave the company for any reason.
In addition, the current arrangement poses a cybersecurity danger to the company. Any one individual, if
he or she is dissatisfied with the company or becomes disgruntled for any reason, can take advantage of
Forrest Lawn and do great damage with the IT function the individual controls.
For example, personal data on customers resides with CloudCorps’ servers, which only Jack Johnson can
access. If Jack were to develop a toxic relationship with the company, Jack could use his sole access to
customer records and wreak havoc with them, possibly manipulating the company with his control or
simply compromising the privacy of the customers. Forrest Lawn, not Jack, would be liable in such a
situation.
As Manager for Customer Service, you realize that many of the potential problems that could arise at
Forrest Lawn will have an impact on your area. Customers will not have records updated, will not be
billed on time, will not receive blog updates, and will be impacted in other ways if any of the situations
described above occur.
Moreover, if customers’ records are compromised, you will have a customer service crisis on your hands.
Your Task You are to write a short report to Richard Smith, the owner, and point out the problem with the current
personnel policies at Forrest Lawn. You also want to suggest some basic steps the company take take to
address the situation before a problem arises.
Some concepts and strategies you might want to point out to Richard include the following:
• separation of duties
• mandatory vacations
• job rotation policies
• agreements with vendors, including password and other login information
• IT confidentiality agreements
Your report will
• be 1500-2000 words in length.
• incorporate at least three references.
o Integrate more than three references if you would like.
o Cite and list them in APA 7th edition style.
• include at least one graphic. The graphic should demonstrate either the current personnel arrangement
(and the problems it poses) or your proposed personnel arrangement (and how it addresses the current
problems) or both. Of course, if you would like to include more than one graphic, you may do so.
You will need to apply the following Golden Rules of Technical Communication:
• Rule #1: Paper is Permanent. Make sure your word forms are accurate and your grammar and mechanics
are correct. Others in the company in addition to Richard might see your memo. It is not only Richard who
might be judging your message based on the quality of your writing.
• Rule #2: Know your Audience.
o Keep in mind that you are writing to Richard Smith. He is your primary audience. He is not an IT
expert, nor is he a human resources professional. In addition, consider his education level and his
lack of acumen for IT-related matters.
o Note that Richard is your boss. You are writing to a superior about a problem that he does not
realize is a problem.
o Understand that, while Richard is your primary audience, other members of the IT team are
secondary audiences. They might see your memo eventually.
▪ Consider their level of education. Some of them have bachelor’s or master’s degrees.
▪ Don’t offend them. You don’t want to write anything that would cause a problem
between you and members of the IT Department if they see your memo.
• Rule #4: Break It Out. Instead of writing long, thick, dense paragraphs, you want to write readable text.
o Bullet information in places if necessary
o Write short, crisp sentences that are readable.
o Write short paragraphs rather than long ones, as you deem necessary.
Use your judgment about how to break out your text as you consider the rhetorical situation.
• Rule #7: Signpost. Use headings to help Richard navigate your document. Provide a table of contents to
help Richard see the different sections of your report and help him to find them easily.
• Rule #9: Contemplate Before You Illustrate. As you construct your graphic, make sure it adds to your
document and does not simply dress up the document. Consider how best to illustrate the current problem
or the possible solution with your graphic(s).
• Rule #10. Cut the Fluff. Richard is a busy business owner. He is not expecting your report. He has not
budgeted time in his schedule to read it. You will need to communicate the current problem and suggest an
alternative to it without getting wordy or including information that is not helpful to your purpose.
How the Report Should Be Organized
Your short report will have the following sections:
• Memo (written to Richard Smith) – no more than 150 words
• Executive Summary – no more than 300 words
• The Problem
• Suggested Solution
• Conclusion – no more than 200 words
• References
The bulk of the report will be The Problem and Suggested Solution. These two
sections together should compose half or more of the length of the report.
,
Writing Assignment #1
Writing Three Personas
Summary of the Assignment:
• Task: In this assignment, you will write three personas to prepare for writing assignment #2,
the set of instructions that explain how to accomplish a task on a website. You want to read the
instructions for writing assignment #2 before writing your personas.
• Sample papers
o You should access the sample papers for writing assignments #1 and #2 for helpful
models.
o You can watch a video that reviews sample papers for writing assignments #1 and #2.
• Length: Each persona should be 120-250 words in length.
• Graphics: You are not required to use any graphics. If you would like to include a photo for
each persona, you may.
• Tip: The best approach for this assignment is to become familiar with the website on which
you will write writing assignment #2 and then create your personas. For example, if the
website has special steps to take for bulk orders, perhaps one of your personas will be a person
who wants to place a bulk order. If the website takes gift cards, perhaps one of your personas will
be a person who has a gift card and wants to pay with it. You want to become very familiar with
the website in order to create effective personas.
Please see the next page.
Brief Description and Strategies for this Assignment:
In this assignment, you will write three personas for the set of instructions you will write for writing
assignment #2. Please include the following information for each persona:
• a summary of the persona, including the persona’s name, occupation, location, and age
• the website for which you will write instructions for writing assignment #2.
• goals for the persona: why the persona would want to accomplish the task on the web that you
will be describing in writing assignment #2
• at least one unique situation or pain point. For the task that you are describing for writing
assignment #2, describe what unique situations or pain points that the person might encounter in
completing the task online.
o The unique needs or pain points should be clear and focused. You will accommodate
the unique needs or pain points in your set of instructions that you write for writing
assignment #2.
The unique needs or pain points should not be general (e.g., “Stan is not comfortable
with computers”). Rather, they should be specific (e.g., “Stan wants to pay three days in
advance for a party of 10 people”).
A persona who is “not comfortable with computers” cannot clearly be accommodated in
a set of instructions. But if a persona wants to pay three days in advance for a party of 10
people, then the instructions can include steps on how to pay in advance and arrange for a
large party.
o The unique needs or pain points have to be accommodated in your set of
instructions for writing assignment #2. For example, you don’t want to describe a
persona who wants to pay in cash if the website you are writing about does not take cash.
You want to describe a persona whose needs can be accommodated on the website for
which you are writing instructions.
o The unique situations or pain points have to be related to completing the task on the
website. For example, you don’t want to write, “Mark has a fear of ordering online, so he
will call the restaurant to complete his order.” All personas have to complete the task on
the web, and they cannot complete the task by phone or through any other means.
As stated above, the best strategy is to become familiar with the website and then create personas
from there. You want to become very familiar with the website in order to create effective personas.
The sample assignment on Banana Blossom provided in the class for writing assignment #1
demonstrates some unique situations or pain points that personas can have. Make sure to look at
the sample assignments. In addition, please make sure to watch the video that reviews the
sample assignments.
Due Date:
Your instructor will notify you of the due date.
,
Resources to help you do the work
Personas and the five W’s: Developing Content that Meets Reader Needs, Pt. 1
Geoff Hart - Technical Writing - Creating Great Content
Part I: What’s a persona?
Most documentation written by professional writers, whether printed or online, is well written and easy to navigate, but in my experience, an unfortunately high proportion omits important content or provides inadequate depth of content. Worse yet, the information may seem perfectly acceptable from a textbook perspective, yet fails to reflect the conditions under which the information will be used. These problems often arise from a lack of understanding of the audience for whom we’re writing, in many cases because we have done an audience analysis that:
· focused on demographics rather than a realistic portrayal of the audience
· ignored the physical and emotional context in which the audience works
· emphasized product features rather than audience goals and needs
· ignored factors that arise from interactions among audience, context, and goals
The solution is as easy to state as it is difficult to implement: we must understand our audience sufficiently well, before we begin writing, that we can determine the information they require, any context-related constraints that will interfere with their use of the information we create, and any context-related success factors that can help them use that information more successfully. There have been many different approaches to solving this problem, ranging from task analysis to “ use cases “, and each has its merits and demerits. But a relatively recent approach called “personas”, designed originally to support product development and subsequently expanded for use in usability testing, potentially produces a superior analysis because it is more focused on real people and their real needs. The concept of personas was first codified by Alan Cooper, and is described in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum.
So what is a persona?
The persona approach to developing documentation is a form of audience analysis that focuses on describing real people, rather than defining useless demographic categories that only hint at who these people are, their needs, and how their work environment affects those needs. You can see the power of a persona compared with a stereotype through a simple example:
· Useless stereotype: Our typical audience member is a university-educated, physically fit, single white male, 30 years old, who works as a wealthy industrialist. He drives a luxury car by day to support his work life, and a Hummer-type “urban assault vehicle” at night to support a second career as a crime fighter.
· Useful persona: Bruce Wayne is a wealthy industrialist, orphaned at a young age, who pretends to be a gentleman of leisure by day, but by night, he is a master martial artist, detective, and scientist–engineer who fights crime and invents and uses complex weaponry. A chronic lack of sleep plus the distraction of having to ponder the future actions of a range of exceptionally intelligent and highly dangerous supervillains means that he is usually sleep-deprived and mentally distracted during the day. At night, in his Batman role, he has little time to think, and must rely on his wits and his superhuman reflexes: conflict with his many enemies forces him to rely extensively on computer support for his crime-fighting supervehicle, the Batmobile, and on “smart” weaponry. In this situation, he faces many distractions simultaneously, and must often overcome them while badly injured.
Which of the two gives you a better understanding of your target audience? Which gives you a clearer idea of what the person’s documentation needs will be? Clearly, the persona approach works better. It is more detailed and focuses on the person’s needs rather than on socioeconomic and other characteristics that only indirectly hint at those needs. But that’s not all: pretty much any member of a Western culture knows and understands both Batman’ s personality and his “work” environment. Because the persona is so familiar, albeit unrealistic, it’s a helpful way to dramatize the example and illustrate the approach to constructing and using a persona.
A good persona has several key characteristics:
· It names the character, thereby personifying a fictional character and making it seem human. In so doing, it allows us to ask the following question with a reasonable expectation of coming up with the right answer: “What would Bruce do?”
· A collection of relevant personas lets us contrast Bruce with the personas of others who might potentially use our product: “How would Geoff behave differently?”
· It emphasizes details of the person’s personality and context that will affect their use of the product we’re documenting—and of our documentation.
· It offers a narrative, not a series of bullet points. The narrative structure “connects the dots” (the bullets) in such a way that the persona becomes an actor, not a lifeless collection of statistics.
· It provides enough detail that we gradually come to understand the person and how they will behave.
The Bruce persona I’ve provided is more terse than a real persona should be, but we’ll flesh it out progressively during the remainder of this article. I’ve included several references by Kim Goodwin, one of Alan Cooper’s senior designers, to fill in the details that I can’t provide in the space of a short article.
The result of creating a persona is a vivid image that is instantly recognizable as a human being. Over time, our familiarity with a real persona would increase sufficiently that the person “behind the mask” becomes as familiar to us as Bruce’s Batman persona. Each of us spends many years learning to understand and interact with our fellow humans before we ever encounter the concept of written communication, and we then spend a great many more hours learning to interact successfully with our fellow humans than we ever spend learning to write or polishing our writing. Thus, the use of personas takes advantage of well-honed social skills, both conscious and subconscious, that let us interact successfully with friends, family, and co-workers. Because these skills are so strong, the persona approach can provide unparalleled insights into audiences, thereby letting us empathize with and understand the real people for whom we’re creating information. It also provides a clear understanding of their context: the conditions (physical, emotional, and other) under which they work, and the problems we must solve for them within that context so they can accomplish their various tasks. Personas also help us focus on the tasks, but always from the perspective of the aforementioned aspects of their character and context.
Using the five W’s to flesh out the “Bruce” persona
In real-world documentation situations, we would create a detailed description of people who stand in for broadly representative categories of audience member. Typically, it’s only necessary to create a handful of personas to account for the majority of a product’s users. Indeed, creating more than half a dozen or so personas for anything other than the most complicated product may be counterproductive because it complicates the task of analysis beyond what we may be able to handle with the limited resources typically available to most technical communicators. In this article, I’ll describe only a single persona (Bruce, acting in his Batman persona) to avoid complicating the discussion unnecessarily and to help you focus on key details. To further narrow the scope of that discussion, I’ll only consider Bruce’s use of his evening vehicle (the Batmobile) while he interacts with his foes. Don’t forget that if we were doing this analysis for real, we’d also need to consider Batman’s sidekick, Robin, and any other colleagues such as his faithful butler, Alfred, who might want to use the vehicle.
In the short time you’re likely to devote to reading this article, you’re unlikely to become intimately familiar with any new persona that present. To provide enough familiarity that you can explore the power of this approach on your own, I’ve chosen Bruce for my example: the strength and familiarity of his persona compensate for its unrealistic nature and the limited description that I’ve provided.
How do we get to know our persona and use that knowledge to develop better documentation? As I’ve written in previous articles (see the bibliography), the journalistic technique of the five W’s (asking who, what, where, when, and why) is a powerful tool for analyzing a situation. Journalists have been taught a codified version of this approach for nearly a century to ensure that they will capture all the important details in a newspaper article or TV interview, and recognizable forms of the approach go back far longer. Thus, it’s an approach that is proven to work. For more details on the five W ‘s, see the Wikipedia article and the bibliography at the end of this article.
In the case of personas, it’s a great tool to guide us in fleshing out a persona in sufficient detail that we can directly meet the needs of the real people it represents. In the specific and clearly limited context of Bruce’s use of the Batmobile, our goal is to:
· Answer the “who” question by defining a persona. I’ve already done this earlier in this article in my description of Bruce.
· Answer the “when” and “where” questions by defining the context in which the persona works.
· Answer the “why” and “what” questions by defining the tasks the persona must accomplish, the reasons for those tasks, and details of those tasks.
In Part II of this article, I’ll answer those final four questions to show you how they can guide our writing efforts.
Further reading
Brechin, E. 2002. Reconciling market segments and personas .
Calde, S. 2004. Using personas to create user documentation .
Cooper, A. 2004. The inmates are running the asylum: why high tech products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity. Pearson Publishing. 288 p.
Cooper, A. 2003. The origin of personas .
Cooper, A.; Reimann, R.; Cronin, D. 2007. About face 3: the essentials of interaction design. Wiley. 648 p.
Goodwin, K. 2001. Perfecting your personas .
Goodwin, K. 2002. Getting from research to personas: harnessing the power of data .
Goodwin, K. 2006. Taking personas too far .
Goodwin, K. 2009. Designing for the digital age: how to create human-centered products and services. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN. 739 p., including index.
Hart, G.J. 1996. The five W’s: an old tool for the new task of audience analysis . Technical Communication 43(2):139–145.
Hart, G. 2002. The five W’s of online help .
Noessel, C. 2006. Ignore that designer behind the persona .
Schriver, K. 1996. Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers. Wiley. 592 p.
Category: Technical Writing - Tag (s): Creating Great Content
Geoff Hart
13 years ago
Bruce Byfield notes ( https://brucebyfield.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/why-personae-are-a-waste-of-time-in-technical-writing/ ): “I haven’t written a manual for over seven years, so perhaps my opinions about technical writing don’t count for anything.”
Far too easy, so I’ll let that one pass. The important point in this article and in your blog post is the following statement you made: “Admittedly, the exercise of creating a persona can help a writer fix audience segments in mind.”
That’s the whole point of my article: a great many technical writers, including many with years of experience, don’t make even a token effort to do this. They assume that audiences are monolithic and irrelevant so long as they do a good job describing the interface. As a result, they produce the kind of crappy documentation that does a perfect job of describing the product, but is completely useless to anyone who doesn’t already know the product. (Are you listening Adobe and Microsoft?) This is the main reason why publishers such as O’Reilly get rich publishing large series of third-party manuals for commercial software.
Bruce notes: “My impression is that personae are favored by those who stress the writing in their job title at the expense of the technical.”
Very true, because writing = communication, and technical = the product. Writers who remember that the goal is communication still write; those who think it’s all about the technology don’t care about the audience, and are more focused on their own technical needs. Which do you think produces better documentation?
Bruce then provides statistics [sic]: “Nine times out of ten, however, such efforts fail, because they are usually made at the expense of actually learning the subject matter, and of writing and editing.”
90%? Oh really? Let’s see your statistics: name the 10 projects you are considering in this analysis, and tell me which of them worked, and how it differed from the other 9. Or is this merely cherished notion masquerading as fact?
Bruce: “The result? You’re left looking pretentious and turn in a finished manual that only reinforces everybody’s impression that you are a lightweight poseur.”
The only data I have completely contradicts this notion. I’ve written manuals for half a dozen products (MultiDat software and hardware manuals, Harvesting and Silviculture decision support tools, GPS tool, and an in-house document tracking system) using the basic principles behind personas. I succeeded in each case because I understood who I was writing for. The manuals were very well received; for the first four products, the corporate trainers came to personally thank me for what I’d done because the docs cut their efforts to a fraction of the former level—because the manuals met the needs of their audience. Can’t speak to the last two, since I was gone by the time they were implemented.
It’s important to note that I never wrote a Batman persona description. I chose that example specifically because every time I use it in teaching, I can see the light go on in the minds of the audience. An effective persona focuses you on what’s important. An ineffective persona focuses you on a trivial exercise in creative writing. Understand the difference?
·
Personas and the five W's: Meeting Reader Needs, Pt. 2 | Tech Writer Today Magazine by TechWhirl
13 years ago
[…] the first part of this article, I introduced the concept of personas, a tool for creating a detailed description of […]
·
Why personae are a waste of time in technical-writing « Off the Wall
12 years ago
[…] count for anything. All the same, I’m disappointed to see that writers are still being steered towards distractions such as writing personae I can think of little that could do more to waste a writer’s limited time or cause them to be […]
