The working group in the EUREKA project that concentrates on ‘Getting to know the EU FarmBook end users’ focusses on identification of this knowledge demand through the development of profiles of potential end users and several user ‘archetypes’ defined by underlying key variables, such as sector, region, education level, access to infrastructure, gender and generation, etc. The resulting ‘archetypes’ (personas) and their ‘user journeys’ are used to inform the design of the EU FarmBook. Special attention is given to regional differences between different European geographic regions.
What is a persona?
A persona is a fictional representation of a typical user, e.g., a farmer, forester or advisor, based on the typical attributes of a user profile. The persona attempts to cover everything the EU FarmBook designers need to get a useful image of the group of people they design for.
Meet Claudia
What is a user journey?
The user journey helps to identify and understand more about the problems that farmers, foresters and advisors experience in their day-to-day working environment. These can be small problems that are easily solved or more complex problems that represent a long-term challenge. Understanding the user journeys will help the EUREKA project to predict problems that may arise during the development of the EU FarmBook platform, therefore making it more tailored to the user needs.
Claudias user journey
Validation workshops
In January, six validation workshops were held with end users (farmers, foresters, forestry advisors and agricultural advisors) from four macro-regions across Europe to get feedback on the personas and user journeys. In total, 18 archetypes and 16 user-journeys were presented to ensure that the final archetypes and user-journeys reflect the typical users across EU macro-regions. Laurens Van der Cruyssen, who is in charge of the personas and user-journeys in the EUREKA project, explains:
"The selection of which archetype to present during a validation workshop depends on the profiles of the invited end users. We tried to match these profiles to the archetypes as much as possible. For example, the archetype of the older farmer was presented to both farmers and advisors given the increased dependency of the older farmer on the advisor. Additionally, the public forestry advisor was presented twice to foresters and forestry advisors as this was an archetype for which the EUREKA members felt more feedback was required. A good understanding of end-user information needs is essential to the design of the EU FarmBook. These needs include preferred channels of communication, as well as challenges faced in finding the most useful knowledge or data. Such understanding will inform the actual design of the EU FarmBook and allow selection of the most effective communication and dissemination channels to promote EUREKA outputs."
If you would like to see all 18 personas/user journeys please go to https://h2020eureka.eu/ and scroll down.
