Factiva: Personas in the Workflow

When it comes to professional workflows, do you consider y our self a Captain, a Compass, or a Scout?

If you're not sure, you might want to see what the product design team at Dow Jones has discovered after watching and analyzing how people work. This yearlong ethnographic analysis resulted in the creation of six workplace personas as part of the methodology to understand how people interact in a corporate workflow. Greg Merkle, vice president of product design and information architecture at Dow Jones, has been involved in this research that examines the core ecosystem of information inside the enterprise and how users seek, search, and share information.

"At the beginning, we had a simplistic view of our market," says Merkle. "We had information professionals, and we had end users." But he says the latest research expanded upon these two markets in a big way. While company titles - whether product manager, CEO, or middle manager - may describe a person's basic job functions, they don't tell you how each of them fits into the overall workflow. The focus is more about the behavior of the key individuals than any specific job function, he says, and he says he's getting a better understanding of who the customers are.