Personas

To not think about our community as an abstract monolith, but of a heterogeneous group of people with different skill sets and requirements, we developed personas - fictional individuals - with their distinct wants and needs.

In total we determined six personas for our core stakeholder groups. We align these personas with our services to ensure that we can offer added value to these fictional people and also for our services to keep in mind. For these fictional people we develop pathways of how they can navigate our website and services. We keep these people’s needs in mind when designing and optimizing services. Moreover, these personas are not only used for development. We also create marketing material such as videos tailored to their use cases.

We have a set of secondary stakeholders as well, including e.g. journalists or users who use our services as a back-end to their own product. Though we still provide events and services for them, they do not get as much of a developed pathway through the website as the others.

All Images on this site: Copyright Adobe Stock/ master1305

Alex

PhD Student
Computer Science

Hi, I am Alex. I want to find data for my tasks and have that data cleaned up semi-automatically.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Find and create datasets
Clean data
Process data
Create visuals

Problems:

Unstructured and noisy data
Too much time spent with data cleaning
Lacks overview of relevant publications and datasets

Wishes:

Data clean-up service that takes up ~60% of work
Search engines supporting different content types
Quick search to not loose too much time
Service that presents earliers solutions to same task

Ben

PhD Student
Biomedicine

Hi, I am Ben. I want to get a quick overview of related papers and methods first, but later also more details and a clear documentation on demand.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Search for papers/methods for his tasks

Problems:

Gets lost reviewing & researching
Not enough time to read all interesting papers
Incomplete descriptions of methods, data, etc

Wishes:

Better documentation of current state of task

Cassie

Early PhD Student
Social Science

Hi, I am Cassie. I want to find training material on how to deal with data tailored to my needs.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Learning new skills
Review literature
Keep up with community news

Problems:

Steep learning curve
At the same time too much and not enough training material and info

Wishes:

Training resources tailored to her needs
Description of typical workflows and processes
Exchange platform to get in touch with experts

David

Early Postdoc
Biomedicine

Hi, I am David. I want to be able to compare my outcomes with experimental data more easily.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Compare own data with experimental data
Explore meaning of results
Methods research

Problems:

Number of meetings
Data analysis produces strange results without a clue where the problems are
Not enough computational power available

Wishes:

Getting in touch with the right experimentalists
Standards for sharing data with experimentalists
More data, more power

Emma

Postdoc
Computer Science

Hi, I am Emma. I want to be aware of things that are going on in the community.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Literature search
Keeping up with latest methods, datasets, etc.

Problems:

Another group researches same topic & publishes results first

Wishes:

Overview over new hot topics
Also keep up with community news

Finn

Professor
Social Science

Hi, I am Finn. I want to legally and safely store data that can still be connected to code. The system should know who is allowed to access which data.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Data management of his group
Ensure data protection
Write proposals
Fulfill proposal expectations

Problems:

Combining data protection & open science, sometimes the two seem mutually exclusive

Wishes:

Secure & legal place to store sensitive data that can still be connected to executable code
Clearer guidelines for proposals

Gina

Journalist
Journalism

Hi, I am Gina. I want to write scientifically sound, fact-based articles and need to track which source my information is coming from.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

Reading papers, taking notes, summarizing
Getting statements from important people in the field
Writing articles

Problems:

Tracking knowledge provenance
Too many papers, not sure where to start

Wishes:

An overview over relevant information for a specific topic, including the article, where the info is coming from
A starting point for finding relevant scientific literature

Hassan

Developer
Computer Science

Hi, I am Hassan. I want to use your service as backend for my own project. Please give me a good API.

Domain Knowledge:

Technical Skills:

Soft Skills:

Ethical/Legal Skills:

Tasks:

(Research) software development
Using services that already exist in the backend

Problems:

No/bad API

Wishes:

A good API
Support
API description and documentation
Tutorial