SIMS 213
Spring 2002

SIMS 213 Assignment 2

Project Personas, Goals, and Task Analysis

Project Member Roles

* Although Mary is not taking 213, she is contributing her work and school experience.

Revised Problem Statement

Legal professionals (law students, paralegals, legal researchers and writers, law librarians, lawyers, judges, and law professors) rely on legal briefs to keep abreast of developments in the law and to prepare new legal briefs for current appeals. A legal brief is a written legal argument submitted to a judge during the appeals process. Law school organizations like The Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall ("Samuelson Clinic") and public policy organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Media Access Project are writing a significant number of legal briefs representing the public interest in technology law. In addition, a number of individuals and smaller organizations work on only one or two briefs a year. Presently, individuals conducting a comprehensive search for legal briefs relevant to a specific issue must contact many organizations in the technology and public policy community ("TPP Community"). Furthermore, an individual authoring a new legal brief cannot easily distribute this brief to the TPP Community and obtain recognition.

To simplify the processes of searching and submitting legal briefs within the TPP Community, Mary and Tom have been developing a BriefBank database for the Samuelson Clinic. BriefBank's interface will be web based and will facilitate the searching, retrieval, and submission of legal briefs. BriefBank's database has been implemented with Microsoft Access, and the interface will be built in ColdFusion and HTML.

Development and Justification of Personas and Goals

Based on research from the Electronic Publishing class and the last assignment, we identified two distinct types of individuals that would interact with BriefBank: members of the TPP community and a web application administrator. Tom Selsley, currently the Webmaster at the Samuelson Clinic, was able to provide us with a lot of "real world" data about briefs and the clinic's culture and processes.

To gain a better understanding of each type, we developed a unique set of questions (see Appendices 1 and 2) and conducted interviews / observations (see Appendices 3 - 5 for transcripts).

To improve our understanding of the members of the TPP community we interviewed two attorneys working for the Samuelson Clinic. The first attorney that we interviewed recently joined the Samuelson Clinic as a fellow. She has limited experience working with legal briefs but expects to conduct approximately six legal brief searches a year. This attorney became the model for our infrequent user persona, Alex Garcia.

We also interviewed the director of the Samuelson Clinic. She works with legal briefs on a regular basis and has extensive experience searching, evaluating, authoring, and sharing legal briefs. Given her expertise and position, we believe she is the most likely candidate to share briefs on a system like BriefBank. This attorney became the model for our experienced searcher and contributor, Wilma Donahue. Furthermore, we expect to interview another high-level attorney associated with the clinic in the coming weeks. We will make changes to the Wilma persona based on this interview.

To improve our understanding of a web application administrator, we interviewed a SIMS student that is currently administering a web application for another organization. Tom Selsley also contributed first-hand information about the personality, habits, and goals of a Samuelson Clinic Webmaster. We combined all this data to create the Grace Chen persona.

We chose three personas to reflect our research, the targeted nature of our project, and the specific tasks we expect our users to complete on this system. Our personas mirror the characteristics that were common to our interview subjects. For example, our experienced attorney did share briefs, while this was not necessarily true of our junior attorney. Currently, there is some overlap in the tasks and methods of the two attorneys, and we believe that adding a third attorney persona would not add much additional important task information.

Wilma Donahue, frequent user of legal briefs for research

Wilma is a Law Professor at Boalt Hall, where she teaches techlaw and runs a student clinic practicing public interest law. She has been a professor for six years, and prefers academic life to her early career practicing Intellectual Property law in Silicon Valley. She stays in constant motion between her office and lecture halls, collaborating with students and her staff of three. Her students know her for being tough but fair. Wilma does not tolerate her collaborators being late to meet her because one late appointment messes up her whole day.

Wilma is 41, and lives in a 1921 bungalow near campus with her architect husband, Michael, and their eight-year-old daughter, Caitlin. Wilma makes every effort to be home by 6 pm to relieve Heidi, the au pair. Wilma zips home in her Audi Allroad she chose for its adjustable ground clearance--higher for extra speed on Berkeley’s famous speed bumps. Wilma often arrives home starving, having forgotten to eat anything more than a green banana and caffe latte.

Wilma travels frequently and uses many different computers between locations. She has had a Lexis-Nexis account since starting law school in 1983. She is a whiz with office applications, particularly using Word for the stringent formatting required for submitting legal documents to courts. She uses Netscape 4.7 on all her computers because it is not a Microsoft product and she is most familiar with it. Wilma relies heavily on her Palm Pilot for her extensive contact information, but her Palm Pilot to will not sync with any of her computers.

Briefs are an everyday part of Wilma’s life. She applies high-level analysis techniques to her research. Given her familiarity with the law, individual cases, and the techlaw community, she can quickly assess the value of a brief by the writer’s name, the quality of the argument, and the quality of the writing.

Wilma belongs to an informal network of techlaw professionals. When she needs a brief, she can often contact the lawyers involved to get the information. She is obligated, then, to forward her own briefs to other researchers. Both requesting and distributing briefs takes valuable time, and Wilma cannot hand off these tasks to her overworked assistant.

Goals:

• Recognition. She is dedicated to her convictions, and would like her ideas recognized and put in practice in the legal system.
• Finding the right legal argument in a document. Wants to make sound legal arguments that sway appellate judges and therefore win cases and set precedents. Wants a robust collection of legal briefs available to her.
• Convenience. She already spends too much time on the phone and unopened Fedex packages of legal briefs stack up on her desk for days.

Alex Garcia, infrequent legal brief searcher

Alex is a third year law student at Boalt Hall. Originally from Phoenix, Alex earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Arizona State University. At ASU, Alex was an active member of the campus’s chapter of College Republicans and interned for Senator John McCain during his senior year. Following graduation, Alex moved to Los Angeles and worked as a market analyst for a dot com until it ran out of funding.

During his studies at Boalt, Alex realized that the positions advocated by Wilma were consistent with his free market ideology. He has been involved with Wilma’s clinic for the last year. Alex admires Wilma and strives to impress her by producing quality work product in a timely fashion. Two of his clinic projects have required searching for legal briefs. These searches were somewhat frustrating because web services like Nexis-Lexis and WestLaw do not provide legal briefs. Consequently, Alex had to rely on his Internet search skills to find either briefs posted on the websites of the involved parties (or other interested parties) or at least the names of the attorneys for the involved parties. Furthermore, Alex realized that there are often issues with the completeness and/or authenticity of briefs found on web sites. Following such frustrating experiences, Alex heads to the gym and plays raquetball to let off some steam. Considering the self imposed pressure of excelling at the clinic and school, Alex plays a lot of raquetball.

Upon graduation from law school, Alex is going to clerk for a California circuit court judge. He expects this is the first step in his plan of becoming a judge.

Goals:

• Impress Wilma with the quality and timeliness of his work product.
• Minimize the frustration of searching the Internet for legal briefs, even though searching for legal briefs is an infrequent activity.
• When searching for legal briefs, locate briefs that are complete and can be authenticated.

Grace Chen, webmaster

Grace is a 2nd year SIMS student at UC Berkeley. She is 27 years old and was born in Taiwan. Her family moved to San Jose, California when she was 5 years old and she grew up in the bay area. Her father works for IBM and her mother is a realtor. She has a 22 year old brother, Brian, who just graduated from UC Irvine with a business degree. Their parents are religious but neither her nor her brother really are. They accompany their parents to church only for necessary events.

Grace has a boyfriend she doesn’t tell her parents about. His name is Josh Silverman, a computer science graduate student she met at a SIMS/CS mixer. She thinks her parents would just give her grief for not dating a Chinese guy if they knew. They already constantly try to set her up with sons of friends.

Grace went to UCLA for her undergraduate degree because she didn’t get into Berkeley. She majored in computer science with a minor in music. She has taken piano lessons since age 7 and enjoys playing when she has the time. She also enjoys doing outdoor activities with friends like camping and hiking.

Before coming to SIMS, Grace worked at a couple of failed Silicon Valley Internet startups. At SIMS she enjoys networking and database courses the most. Grace still doesn’t really know what to do yet in life. She likes programming but is also interested in other career possibilities. Her first exposure to tech law was a class she took at SIMS and really enjoyed. She subsequently applied for the webmaster job that was advertised by her professor and offered it.

Wilma is Grace’s boss, but she generally doesn’t have a lot of contact with her. Wilma isn’t very demanding as a supervisor. She just wants things “up on the Web”: Wilma doesn’t comment on graphic design or organization. Grace likes Wilma, but is often frustrated with her because she doesn’t answer email or give her the required content for the Web site on time. Since Wilma is so important, Grace feels bad about having to nag her for content.

In her job, Grace likes and designs for efficiency in systems. She is not big on flashy graphics and colors. She prefers clean and straightforward interfaces. She also looks for convenience in a job. She wanted to work on campus because she lives close by in a house with 2 other students.

Goals:

• Get her work done with maximum efficiency, not spending more than ~10 hrs/week on her job.
• Keep her boss happy and deliver what is required.
• Have a good reference and a nice portfolio piece for future jobs.
• Juggle everything in her life without sacrificing too much.

Tasks: Wilma Donahue

Tasks: Alex Garcia

Tasks: Grace Chen

Teamwork