In order to focus the next iteration of my system and provide detail to a scenario of use, I created a persona of a typical user, described her lifestyle, and considered her behaviors and needs relative to the system.
Meet Meg. Meg Jones is a 23-year-old sixth grade science teacher working with Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta. She moved to the area two months ago, after earning her bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University. While in school, Meg was active in the local food movement and participated in a community garden run by students in her dorm. She’s used to eating fresh organic food and instantly notices the differences between her diet and the typical eating habits of her new community.
She sees a lot of these unhealthy habits being reinforced at her school and upon further research learns that Mississippi has the highest rate of childhood obesity in the United States. She wonders what she can do to help her students learn more about nutrition and starts investigating the topic on the Internet.
Her initial research leads her to the topics of slow food and sustainable agriculture. Along the way, Meg also becomes interested in the public policy side of the issues. She reads about Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program, the current battles over a soda tax intended to slow the obesity rate, and learns more about slow food movements across the country. She looks at the Edible Schoolyard model, initiated by Alice Waters in Berkeley, not far from where she went to school. She decides to see if there is any interest in working on a similar project at her new school in Mississippi.
She talks to the school principal about starting a small garden as part of an after school program. She tells him she is familiar with prepping and planting a plot of land due to her participation in the community garden at her Stanford dorm. She indicates that she’s willing to take full responsibility for heading up the program and suggests that the students can sell the vegetables they grow at a school farmer’s market. She also pitches ways to incorporate instruction about gardening and different types of foods into her curriculum.
Meg thinks the issues surrounding childhood obesity are important and that more people need to start learning and talking about them, particularly in areas such as the Mississippi Delta region, where obesity is an epidemic. Because of her interests in these topics and background in public policy, Meg decides to start a blog covering the information that she thinks will be valuable to her current community. She hopes to garner their support for her school garden through the blog and also to motivate people to live healthier lifestyles and teach their children by example. She decides to document the process of building and maintaining the garden, in an effort to give her audience the opportunity to relate to something local. She wants to contribute to the public discourse surrounding these topics and dedicates herself to becoming the community’s citizen journalist, her main goal being to generate conversation.
Meg chooses to use the blogging software Fieldnotes because it includes the tools that she needs for browsing, collecting, sorting, and writing all in one. She also likes the fact that she has full access to these tools through the Fieldnotes app for her iPad, which she carries both to school and when she travels. She needs this system because she has a tight schedule and likes to work on her blog whenever she has a free moment to spare. On Thursdays and Fridays Meg works an evening shift at a local boutique, staying after school to blog in her downtime between jobs. Since she’s inside at school all day, she likes taking her iPad outside to write and favors the touchscreen environment over the school’s desktop computers.