Personas

A persona is a fictional user that the engine plays through a scenario. The library in casts/library holds ten generic ones for the kinds of user that every site has. Your team copies the ones it needs and adapts them to its product.

Fictional composites

Every persona in the library is invented. Each is a composite built from public sources and from common patterns, and none is built from a real person or a real customer’s data. CONTRIBUTING.md sets the same rule for new personas. Keep it when you adapt one. Do not paste interview notes, support tickets or analytics about named people into a profile.

A persona describes a need and does not stand for a group. Margaret is careful online, and many older adults are confident. Noor uses a screen reader, and no single person speaks for all blind users.

Copy a persona into your cast

1. Copy the folder. For example, cp -r casts/library/keyboard-only-user casts/<your-cast>/.
2. Edit profile.md. Change the name if you like. Keep id the same as the folder name, because the loader checks it. Keep device as desktop, tablet or phone.
3. Replace the placeholders. In the scenarios, [the product] is your product’s name. [the fact] is a fact people look for on your site. [the organisation] and [the app] are what they sound like. Fill in every placeholder before a run. The model reads them as written and guesses what they mean.
4. Rename the roles for the permission trio. role-viewer, role-editor and role-admin use generic names. Change role in the front matter, the folder names and the text to the role names in your app. Replace the example addresses such as /admin and /records/1/edit with real ones.
5. Add the product’s own words. If your product has a term such as “workspace” or “claim”, put it in the scenario so the persona looks for it.
6. Add scenarios that match your risks. Each file is scenarios/NN-<id>.md with a heading, a goal and steps.
7. Keep the source lines. If you add a trait, say where it comes from and tag it sourced or inferred as STYLE.md describes. A trait with no source is removed.

Run it with dummyrun run as ENGINE.md describes. Start with a read-only target for the seven visitor personas.

The permission trio

role-viewer, role-editor and role-admin probe what each role can see and do beyond its rights. Each has four scenarios that try obvious things a curious user would try, such as an edit address for a viewer or an admin page for an editor. Run them only on a test environment with test data and test accounts. A finding where a role can do something it should not is usually the most useful one a run produces.

Settings a persona can use

The engine reads these keys from profile.md, and Device: and Zoom: lines from a scenario. ENGINE.md has the full rules.

Format gaps

The cast format is a folder with profile.md, prompt.md and scenarios. The engine ignores front matter keys it does not know. These are the things the library needs that the format still lacks. The library works around each one in the prompt, and the engine code is unchanged.