User persona for advanced content creator

As the Curriculum and training group has identified while outlining the various skill sets involved in site creation & use, there's an under-represented skillset in the site creation process: that of the "Advanced content creator". This person has unique requirements, and to describe the requirements, it's first helpful to describe the person / persona. I hope this will be useful not only to the Curriculum & training group, but to other Drupal initiatives related to the Drupal needs of this type of user that is (already, if not increasingly) frequently present at sites deploying Drupal. (Thus the cross-posting to multiple groups.)

Background

This describes a hypothetical person who has this role. Obviously, some of the personal characteristics are fictional, and merely serve to humanize the description.

Job description

Ellie is the day-to-day person responsible for making sure the web content needed by her employer gets onto the site, and meets the goals of her boss (the CMO). You can liken her job to a Producer on a TV show, where she must both do things directly as well as get others to do things to make sure the product (web pages) are finished at top quality.

To do this, she:

• Works with the CMO & other marketing team members to come up with compelling and useful new ideas for website functionality. She works with that team to test general ideas out with paper mockups in a quick user study to vett the ideas before starting implementation.
• Design page layouts (in partnership with the marketing team) to achieve the goal
• Implement those page layouts in the CMS
• Assure that all pages created look good on a mobile and tablet devices
• Directly writes content for web pages as well as getting others to write content, that she must approve before it is posted
• Creates or find images or videos to display on pages, as well as getting others ..(as above)
• Creates news items about upcoming events in local RHS hospitals or cities, things happening in the organization, or the health care world, etc., as well as getting others ..(as above)
• Sometimes creates A/B or multivariate tests of page designs to dig another layer deeper to discover which layout achieves the desired visitor behavior
• Creates / edits content types & views as needed to fill content in desired page sections
• Troubleshoots error messages for other content creators who don't have to do anything except create pages (e.g. for those wo "just create nodes" in Drupalspeak)

For difficult problems - e.g. Drupal capabilities needed, or new JS widgets, or ..- she has access to a Drupalist at the digital agency RHS used for the site build. She does not, however, have a Drupal programmer or themer on staff with her, and her budget is tight enough where she cannot hire one every time a new page layout is needed. So she must mostly work within the constraints of what Drupal gives her, without new coding for every new initiative.

Specific content creation needs

Ellie must fundamentally be able to create 90%+ of what the CMO wants without having to call the digital agency. This means she needs to be able to do the following:

• Create any page in her choice of 1, 2, or 3 column layout, with the flexibility to put various sections (e.g. Drupal blocks or equal) in various places on the page. These blocks may sometimes want to span micro-columns. See, for example, http://espn.go.com/ and note how the block under the hero image contains micro-columns. It's highly likely that the digital agency that built the site will not have added Drupal .tpl elements for the new layouts that need implemented. And since Ellie does not want to become a Drupalist (coder, front end developer, or themer), she needs to be able to (mostly) point/click to create the necessary pages.
• (Note: All such pages will essentially preserve the branding of the overall site. On occasion, however, the background image of the page may be required to be vary. Note again, for example, how the page background changes as you browse from http://espn.go.com/ to http://espn.go.com/nfl/ . Similar changes may happen from place to place on the RHS site.)
• Create variants on some of these pages that will be delivered to mobile devices. There is a presumption that there is no separate "mobile site" (e.g. no m.rhs.com), and that the site is viewed in browsers on smart phones. RHS would prefer to be able to specify that some pages do not attempt to show to mobile phones all the page content in the same layout as on the browser site; so laying out a mobile-specific page, and previewing that page is one of Ellie's needs.
• A/B & multivariate tests. She needs to be able to test all types of options - e.g. page layouts, location of elements on a page (e.g. does the "register for more info" button pull better if above, or below the call to action?) - and quickly determine which pulls better, and then have all accesses go to the better-performing page.
• Re-use content across multiple microsites. At RHS, there is a corporate site, but more important are all the individual sites for each hospital. Most hospitals will use the same basic structure for static content (though "application-type" interactions may vary). So she wants to be able to re-use both text and media assets across multiple sites. When content is changed that is used on other sites, she needs to be able to determine if that change should propagate to the other sites (i.e. don't propagate the change automatically without workflow review).
• Create multilingual sites, since many of their hospitals are in southern US border towns with predominantly spanish speakers. She would prefer that the selected language for the user be preserved across visits (e.g. stored in a cookie & re-used on subsequent visits).
• Personalized content. The hospital wants to deliver targeted content based on various context features. For instance, once a visitor starts to look at palliative care, the CMO wants the site to start delivering other associated content across all the site that is associated with palliative care - even potentially remembering that interest if the visitor goes to another RHS site in the same region (e.g. switching looking at the Fort Worth to the Dallas hospital).
• Forms, especially those connected to the hospital CRM system. Yes, the hospital uses Salesforce for some aspects of its operations, such as running paid seminars on doctor office / clinic management. Signup forms must push registration info into RHS' Salesforce.com account.
• Landing pages. While these pages are highly-targeted, tightly-designed pages, they can still live within the boundaries of the existing site's overall design. However, there is an occasional need to place a unique control in a unique place. Examples include putting an below content on a page (e.g. as here), or a combination of vertical tabs plus an associated submenu (e.g. as done here).