Example

Here is a short page summary of Jeff, a potential, online, small commercial banking service customer.

Jeff Monroe

Building contractor, co-owner of KJ Build with Keith Grimaldi.

Personal Description

35 years old

Has been a carpenter for most of his adult life, primarily working for small construction companies like the one he now runs.

Works 50–70 hours a week building single-family homes in Ann Arbor and Dexter, Michigan.

Has owned KJ Build with Keith for five years.

Portrait

Technological

Jeff has a three-year-old Dell computer that he shares with his wife, Janet. They have an account through MichNet, a local ISP. He uses the computer to exchange email with friends, check up on the Redwings, and occasionally check out some of the carpentry and homebuilding sites.

Last year, he bought some tools from sears.com, mostly as an experiment.

He bought MYOB, the small-business accounting software and installed it a couple of years ago, but he never managed to make the transition to using it from having a pile of papers and a calculator on his desk.

Roles

KJ employs a part-time accountant, and Jeff and Keith share the financial responsibilities, but Jeff does most of the day-to-day books.

In the future, Keith and he would like to expand KJ Build to include several permanent employees and be able to build two houses at once, each supervising a job site.

Tasks

Both Jeff and KJ Build have accounts with Great Lakes Bankcorp, and Jeff uses Great Lakes'Web service to check on his personal account and pay bills.

Typical tasks that he does include the following:

• Paying salaries to contractors

• Paying for materials

• Collecting income from clients, often in installments

• At tax time, collecting all of his invoices and expenditures to give to the accountant

• Keeping track of deductible expenses

• Paying various small-business fees (license, bond, etc.)

• Paying business taxes (for both Ann Arbor and Dexter, Michigan)

He often uses credit cards for short-term revolving credit.

Current Problems

Money comes in "feast or famine" waves to KJ, occasionally causing cash flow problems as materials and hourly subcontractors have to be paid before KJ receives the final contract payment.

Sometimes Jeff has to let the bills pile up because he's too busy working on the houses, and this further complicates the payment process.

All of the paperwork needs to be organized for tax time.

When a client is late with a payment, some credit card and utility bills don't get paid.

Desires

Would like to be able to pay his materials and subcontractor bills more easily and keep track of which contracts are outstanding.

Wants to reduce the amount of paper (and numbers) he needs to keep track of.

Would like to be able to share financial information more easily with Keith.

Would like to better predict upcoming cash shortfalls.

Values

Jeff prefers to work with small family-run businesses like his rather than giant conglomerates.

In the end, profiles are still just convenient abstractions of factors that need to be taken into account when developing a product. But personifying a set of ideas and values is an old technique for communicating complex sets of ideas by tapping into people's natural ability to remember things in the form of stories. It goes all the way back to the morals taught by Aesop and histories passed on over the campfire. By creating a cast of characters and engaging them in a representative set of stories, you create not only an effective tool for communicating an understanding of the audience, but one that helps you reach that understanding in the first place.