Persona #1— Graduate Student Researcher

Hope Lee

Hope Lee has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and is an MS/PhD student in Environmental Engineering in UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She has completed her coursework and is working on her dissertation on Indoor Environment and Quality. She is currently a Graduate Student Researcher helping Professor Greenhammer on the Individual Thermostat Research Project. As a GSR on this project, she assists in the design of studies to evaluate the relationship between personal temperature control and thermal comfort satisfaction in office buildings. She also helps to design the devices that measure thermal conditions in office environments. Hope is comfortable with statistical programs like SPSS but prefers to use Excel for most of her analysis.

Hope is 31 years old and lives in the Rockridge district in Oakland. She works out regularly at the Recreational Sports Facility (RSF) on campus where she takes yoga and taichi classes. Sometimes she likes to join others at CBE for a game of frisbee. She begins every morning with a relaxing cup of herbal tea or yerba mate. She does not drink caffeine, prefers homeopathic medical care, and takes echinacea at the first sign of cold. She does not own a car and gets around mainly by public transportation or rollerblades.

Goals:

• Make an impression on Prof. Greenhammer that she is a hard-working, intelligent student.
• Increase her research efficiency. Since she often does the preliminary data analysis for Prof. Greenhammer, Hope would like easier access to the data they collect.

Scenario: Hope begins data exploration

Hope and William recently implemented a survey as part of their research on individual thermostats. William will be presenting his recent work at the Window Technology Roundtable in Eugene, Oregon next month, so Hope needs to quickly find some interesting avenues to explore in preparing his presentation.

Steps:

1. Hope is interested in plotting thermal comfort satisfaction against workspace location in a single survey dataset, so she selects a survey from the Control Panel and adds it.
2. She then selects her specific questions. She selects the thermal comfort satisfaction question and clicks “Add to Column”. She selects the workspace location question and clicks “Add to Row”.
3. Several thermal comfort satisfaction charts appear in the display area, one for each floor in the building.
4. Hope notices that respondents on the third floor are particularly dissatisfied with their temperature in comparison to other respondents. This is interesting since the third floor of the building has a balcony on the north side. She notes the difference in her notebook so she remembers to look into this more when she does her statistical analysis.
5. She selects this questions and chooses "Clear" from the menu to remove it from view. The corresponding charts also disappear.
6. She then decides that she would like to view the relationship between proximity to a window and thermal comfort. She adds the "Are you near a window (within 15 feet)" question to the row and then sees two thermal comfort satisfaction charts.
7. She decides that she would like to view both the statistical and graphical information related to these charts. She selects the "Chart and Data" view from the views selector located at the bottom of the screen.
8. As she had hypothesized, the respondents who had were near a window seemed to be more satisfied with their temperature. Since this is the basis of her research, she decides she'd like to save these charts, so she selects the charts, and exports them to the network to share with William.