Introducing the Drupal.org User Personas

As part of our mission to reinvent Drupal.org, we’ve been digging deep to understand who uses the website and how. At DrupalCon Austin, we began the process of discovering the personas of users who visit Drupal.org: to do so, we interviewed numerous Drupal.org users and asked questions about how frequently they use Drupal.org, how they use the website, their frustrations with Drupal.org, the things they enjoy about the site, and how we can make it easier for people to learn, use, and connect on Drupal.org.

Once we had that data, we set about looking for patterns and common themes. We built categories where we grouped people's similar experiences and frustrations together, and at the end of the process we had come up with five distinct personas that can apply to everyone who visits Drupal.org. These personas detail our users’ familiarity with Drupal software and Drupal community, how they use Drupal.org, how they contribute (or don’t), and more.

The five personas that we drew up are based on proficiency in Drupal and the Drupal ecosystem. They are:

• Newcomer: This person has heard of Drupal, but has never built a Drupal site and doesn’t know where to start.
• Learner: This person knows a bit about Drupal and the general Drupal ecosystem. He or she may have built a Drupal website, but likely has used only a few contrib modules and hasn’t made any customizations.
• Skilled: This person understands and is fluent in Drupal-specific terminology, can build a Drupal website themselves using contributed modules, themes or distributions, or with the help of Drupal service providers. She or he has spent a decent amount of time working with Drupal, and is lightly engaged with the community, often not directly, via some sort of liaison.
• Expert: This person has a deep understanding of Drupal and the Drupal ecosystem, knows how to build advanced websites with Drupal. Expert typically has been working with Drupal for at least a couple of years, is actively engaged with the community online and via local/national events, and actively contributes back in a variety of ways.
• Master: This person has pervasive knowledge of Drupal and the Drupal ecosystem. He or she knows how to build Drupal websites of great complexity, is deeply engaged in the Drupal community, knows and has access to other Masters. Usually this person has been using Drupal and been around the Drupal community for a long time.

Proficiency-based personas are a new facet through which we can look at our community. It’s important to note that these personas are NOT only about developers. All kinds of roles can be on different levels of this ladder — UX designers, project managers, and business owners can be Experts and Masters, just like developers and themers. Simultaneously, people can have different backgrounds and be experts in other areas, but when it comes to fluency in Drupal and Drupal ecosystem, they would be represented as Newcomers, or Learners, or any of the other personas.

How will we use personas?

User personas will guide feature prioritization and feature development for Drupal.org, as we improve the site to make it easier for our users to progress from Newcomers to Masters. There are a variety of different ways we can go about it, but since our resources are limited, we will focus on just a few critical areas that will have the biggest impact on the overall user experience. So, to start our work, we’ll be focused on removing barriers and helping our users move more easily from Learners to Skilled. We found that our users have great success moving from Newcomer to Learner today, whereas moving from Learner to Skilled is much more difficult, since so much of the project is focused on doing things “the Drupal way” and learning the processes. Our secondary focus will be on moving users from Skilled to Expert.

Growing our pool of Skilled users is crucial, because by doing so we grow the number of people who own and/or build websites using Drupal, thus grow Drupal adoption. On the path from Skilled to Expert is when our users begin to give back by contributing patches, writing documentation, building and sharing modules and themes, helping others in the issue queues, and bringing in their friends. By growing the number of Skilled and Expert users on Drupal.org, we’ll directly grow our community. It’s a win-win.

By growing Drupal adoption and growing our community, we directly support our mission and goals as an organization (you can read more about those in our 2015 Leadership plan and budget), and that’s why improving Drupal.org is one of our organizational imperatives in the coming year. The 2015 Drupal.org roadmap outlines the numerous ways we’re planning to do it.

As we use personas in our work, you may hear us refer to our “Primary” (Learner and Skilled), “Secondary” (Expert), and “Tertiary” (Master and Newcomer) personas — these distinctions correspond to the order of conversions we look to make easier, not to the users’ importance. Every Drupal.org user is important to us!

As we modify Drupal.org, we’ll be using the personas to help us make the experience for the whole community better. After all, that’s what these personas are — a representation of the entire Drupal community. To help bring our personas to life, we talked to five different community members, each representing one user persona. Over the next few days we’ll share the stories of each person’s unique Drupal journey so that we can see how they got to where they are now. We’d like to say a big thank you to each of our volunteers for sharing their personal stories — as always, they’ve reminded us how fantastic our community really is.

At the end of the series, we’ll close it all off with interviews with several prominent community members who will share their views on how personas can be used outside of Drupal.org development.

We enjoyed working on the user research project and are excited to share user personas with the Drupal community. As a reminder, you can view and download the full report. Take them, use them, go out and make great things!