Allison McCallum Persona

The following persona is based on user research done for preliminary Library & Sakai 3 Integration design work.

Allison is an Ann Arbor local who studied at the University of Michigan and has made her way around the world studying aboriginal languages. She's been teaching at UM for almost a decade now and is always trying to find new ways of taking advantage of the various and always-changing research and teaching tools available to her. Keeping up with technology while balancing students' increasing demands for online material and her own research goals has proven challenging. Allison is relatively tech-savvy, not usually having trouble with information systems she uses, though she does have a feeling there are a lot of features she does not take advantage of. She has trouble with seeing the value in the many tools that are now available to her. She knows that other professors are using the CTools Poll tool, for example, but has no idea why or how it would make for a better learning experience.

Allison also wonders whether the content and tools she is already using are really effective. She added a new journal article to her course this semester and has a feeling that not many students appreciated it. She thought it was great not only because of the content but because it was easily accessible online through the UM Library. Asking students in class whether they found it useful, she did not get much useful feedback.

Allison does know that good images and videos really engage students and get learning across very well. She often finds herself spending hours on Google searching for an image or video for a lecture. She knows the UM Library has some great image collections, but she is not sure how or where to find or search them. She would love it if there were a way to find good multimedia content faster.

Overall, Allison appreciates UM's CTools environment because it really cuts down her administrative burden. She likes the UM Library's services because she's able to create her own custom database sets and search them easily. Because she's not much of an explorer when it comes to technology, she feels there may be some advanced features she doesn't know how to use and ends up doing a lot of manual copying and pasting when dealing with citations she finds through UM's journal article search and needs to use in her syllabus or lecture slides.