May 5, 2010
User Personas
“The cookies were good. Thank you for forcing me to eat them.”
Stranger Than Fiction
Chef Whitlyn Garrison Vail
L’artisan French Bakery is owned by Chef Whitlyn Garrison Vail but most people know her as Cricket. She grew up in sort of rural luxury. Her mother taught her cooking and baking and sewing; she learned still more about baking pies and cakes from an elderly couple — retired bakers — who lived next door. Cricket was a hard-working, serious child. A straight A student, she won a partial scholarship to The College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, NJ and worked as a bakery chef to help pay expenses. She began her college career intending to study pre-med, but later switched to art, European history and architectural history. Just after her sophomore year, she married Pierson Clairemont Vail the Sixth, a law student. After graduation, she continued a successful bakery chef career, working for several locale caterers until her daughter was born, and Cricket quit working outside the home.
After her daughter was born, she and her husband moved to just outside of Austin, where they undertook the ambitious restoration of an 1805 farmhouse. Cricket started a catering business when her daughter started attending a private school, first in partnership with a friend and then on her own. In ten years this business, which she ran out of her farmhouse, had become a $1 million enterprise. She also opened a chain of retail stores to sell specialty foods and supplies for entertaining.
Chef Cricket uses the internet to do work, generate income and run her business. She sees the internet as a way for her to increase her brands exposure and sell her products. Cricket uses the internet to video conference with the managers of her stores for weekly meetings. She has found that this has cut down on issues of being late or complaints about traveling to the meetings. Cricket stays current on events by reading cnn.com daily.
Chef Blossom
Chef Blossom, is a baker that attended Harvard Law School but dropped out in favor of baking to “make the world a better place”. She is highly averse to paying her taxes for things she doesn’t want them to pay for, and claims she is a tree hugger.
Blossom began working in other peoples bakeries where she noticed organic baked goods all had a few things in common – they were brown, heavy as rocks, and tasted weird. She became committed to using organic ingredients to make great pastries that looked and tasted like their conventional baked brethren, but were better for the earth. Blossom noticed that lots of customers were asking where to find things, like “the organic brown rice flour you put in the Maple Pecan Muffins or Berry Tea Biscuits.” To keep her guests satisfied, Blossom opened Blossom’s Organic Bakery were she strives to be as eco-concious as possible without sacrificing taste or looks. From the start she was committed to offering her customers products made from the finest all natural ingredients.Having been born and raised in Texas, she knows the difference between naturally grown farm fresh foods, versus what she could buy in the grocery store. She even mills her own flour.
Chef Blossom mostly uses the internet to socialize. It helps her to communicate with friends by using social networking websites, through e mails, and chatting online. She also spends time researching her hobbies. She is trying to improve on her hobbies by reading up on them. She also takes part in discussion forums about leading a healthy lifestyle. She likes to be able to express her ideas however she wants. Her friends have been encouraging her to try online dating and she is thinking about it.
