We sponsor a website as often as we can - and when we know that the recipient will be able to use the sponsored website as an effective communication tool. We recently offered a website to Diana Christian, a published author, because she's working in a field that is of utmost importance to our world. Diana helps people create and maintain intentional communities.

I asked her to send me 5 profiles of the people she'd expect to visit her website. Wow, did she sent us some good material!

We treat projects as gardens. In our development process, user profiling is like planning the the type of harvest we'd like to see. Here's one of the profiles Diana sent us.

Paul is a young man in grad school, studying environmental science. He's 26 and after grad school hopes to be hired by a series of ecovillages to help them design their systems. He Googles around, finds me, reads everything online about me. He calls to ask how he can work with me so I can recommend his services to ecovillages so he can help them with overall site design, land use planning, wastewater systems, etc.

He's from Michigan and his family is middle class, not wealthy and not poor. He's very focused on his professional career. He's enthusiastic about what he's learned and what he knows. He's passionate to change the world. He believes "ecovillages" means "ecological sustainability," "appropriate technology," "constructed wetlands," "biological wastewater treatment," etc. He knows at some level it also involves shared values, a shared mission & purpose, cooperation, shared resources, good communication skills, a cooperative decision-making process, etc., but he thinks of these as "lightweight" aspects of the "real" things -- physical stuff.

He's viewing ecovillages through the "guy" lens. "That touchy-feeling stuff is OK, but let's get back to the the real deal here."  

Paul is athletic and gregarious. He's very Internet-savvy of course, as he's been online all his life. He rides a bike and takes trains. He doesn't understand at first when I tell him that most ecovillage projects don't hire an outside person do design all these separate systems; they tend to design and build each of them themselves. And that they do the projects incrementally over the years, as they can afford it, not all at once.  The ideal career he's envisioning may not be possible with ecovillages, but there may be business projects with green and eco components that could use his skills.

Instead of my getting more consulting or workshop business form this phone call I fall into a form of career counseling until I  realize it's not a good use of my time.  I ask him if he'd like to hire me as a phone consultant but I know he'll say No, and he does. I tell him that I'll need to go back to work then, and wish him well.

Once we have the profiles, we map out the most likely actions the user will perform on the site. Here's what we think Paul will do.

• Comment on blog posts
• Search for content via the search box
• Browse through blogs by topic and archived months
• Share or forward interesting items to friends via social networks
• Download sample chapters of Diana's books
• Watch embedded video interviews of Diana
• Look at an embedded photostream from Flickr of the eco-village in which Diana lives
• Download a Diana's workshop/event schedule
• Contact Diana via her contact form and writes down her telephone number

We've covered most of these actions in projects before...many many times, so we already have template user stories that are more specific for each action. For example, we'd specify what steps Paul would take to search and what he would do when the results are displayed.

The story and profile leads to building the functionality that satisfies what Paul and Diana wish to achieve during their virtual interaction. Ever since changing our workflow in Drupal development to include exportables and features, providing the above functionality has become modular, simple and manageable. We build the solution once and use that evolving solution in multiple projects. Diana's project resulted in two new modules and a theme being released to drupal.org:

• opengrid_ui - a javascript utility for configuring grid layouts
• input_formats - exportable input formats for incorporating wysiwyg editor settings in features
• opengrid - a simple elegant base theme for Drupal based on a fixed or fluid grid system

We're having fun and we love giving back!