I have divided the class up into groups of five (and one group of six). Your job, as a group, is to develop personas to be used in developing a new IT department website.

Using the guidelines in Kuniavsky's book (chapter 7, User Profiles), or the Evolt tutorial on persona creation, your group should research at least three different possible user types (IT student, non-IT or potential student, and IT faculty). You can do this by having each group member individually interview potential users, or by doing this as a group. (If your group has more than six members, you can add "IT Graduate Student" as a final type. Consider interviewing the graduate assistants for data, since they're relatively easy to to find.)

You are welcome to do cross-group research, as well. To facilitate this, I will try to have at least two other IT faculty members come to the class on Wednesday so that you can ask them questions. I assume that you have easier access than I do to other students!

Based on the information you gather, your group should develop persona profiles for each type of site user, and present those as part of a coherent and consistent single document (one example of this would be the persona section of the BBC Glass Wall document).

The group as a whole should make the decision about the persona characteristics, but each person should be individually responsible for a portion of the document. How you divide things up is up to you, but one approach might be:

• Overall project manager (responsible for formatting, quality control, etc)
• One person each for the IT student, non-IT student, and IT faculty personas
• One person to write up a description of the development process you used. How many people did you talk to? How did your group decide on key aspects of the personas?

A "credits" section at the end of the document should identify which team member was primarily responsible for each section or task.

The finished document should be submitted by midday on Sunday, February 25th. Only your project manager should upload the final document to the dropbox.

In addition to the document, each group member should submit a completed peer evaluation form, which will factor significantly in your final grade. The form can be submitted to me in paper form or electronically, no later than midnight on Monday, February 26th.