Abstract
Enterprise server systems, such as e-mail servers, database servers, and e-commerce servers, are the heart and soul of businesses throughout the world. They are complex back-end systems that typically fall under the realm of system administrators and developers, and drive many of the front-end client applications used by the billions of end-users in businesses on a regular basis. It is critical that these complex systems be easy to learn, install, use, troubleshoot, maintain, and upgrade. This paper describes our experience using a persona-based approach to develop complex e-business server systems. It provides an overview of personas and their benefits, the approach we took to create them and enable their adoption, and the lessons we learned that may be adapted by human factors professionals in different industries. The personas we created increased the product team's awareness of our target server audience, as well as their needs, skill levels and goals. The adoption of our personas has been fairly widespread, influencing everything from feature-based user-interface design decisions to far-reaching strategic planning for our next major product release.
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