The GenderMag Project

Customize "Pat (Patricia/Patrick)"

* Update the blue text as desired. Produces a printout (or save-as pdf) of your customized persona "Pat Jones"

Preferred Pronoun






    She scans all her  emails first to get an overall picture before answering any of them. 

Background and Skills


Pat (Patricia/Patrick)

Pat
  • 43 Years Old
  • Employed as an Accountant
  • Lives in Cardiff, Wales

    Pat loves public transportation and knows at least three routes to get there from home. When she arrives at work,

     she scans all her emails first to get an overall picture before answering any of them.

    (This extra pass takes time but seems worth it.) Some evenings she plays computer puzzle games like Sudoku before bed.

Background and Skills

    Pat works as an accountant in consulting firm. She prefers to stay with the technologies for which she has already mastered the peculiarities.

    She just moved to this employer 1 week ago, and

    their software systems are new to her.

     

    she  describes herself as a

    "numbers person",

    but she is not a professional programmer and has never taken any computer programming or IT systems classes. Pat has a degree in accounting so she

    knows plenty of Math and knows how to think with numbers.

     

    In her free time, even though she's an accountant and deals with numbers all day it work,

    she likes working with numbers

    in her free time, too. She especially likes Sudoku and other computer games that involve puzzling.


Motivations and Attitudes

  • Motivations: Pat learns new technologies when she  needs to, but she doesn't spend her  free time exploring technology  or exploring obscure functionality of programs and devices thatshe  uses. she  tends to use methods she  is already familiar and comfortable with to achieve her  goals.
  • Computer Self-Efficacy: Pat has medium computer self-efficacy about doing unfamiliar computing tasks. If problems arise with her  technology, she  will keep on trying to figure out how to achieve what she has set out to do for quite awhile; she doesn't give up right away when computers or technology present a challenge to her.
  • Attitude toward Risk: Pat is busy and so she  rarely has spare time. So Pat is risk averse and worries that she will spend time on them and not get any benefits from doing so. she  prefers to perform tasks using familiar features, because they're more predictable about what she  will get from them and how much time they'll take.

Attitude to Technology

  • Information Processing Style: Pat leans towards a comprehensive information processing style when she  needs to gather information to problem-solve. So, instead of acting upon the first option that seems promising, she  first gathers information comprehensively to try to form a complete understanding of the problem before trying to solve it.Thus, her  style is "burst-y"; first she  reads a lot, then she  acts on it in a batch of activity.
  • Learning: by Process vs. by Tinkering : When Pat sees a need to learn new technology, she  does so by trying out new features or commands to see what they do and to understand how the software works. When she  does this, she does so purposefully; that is, she  reflects on each bit of feedback she  gets along the way to understand how the feature might benefit her. Eventually, if she  doesn't think it will get her closer to what she  wants to achieve, she will revert back to ways that she  already knows will work.
1Pat represents users with motivations/attitudes and information/learning styles similar to hers. For data on people similar to and different from Pat, see
http://gendermag.org/Foundations.html

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