Personas
Some advice for anyone starting a business is to draw up a list of ‘ideal’ users or personas. The idea is that by thinking of the sort of behaviours and even communities these ‘people’ inhabit can both focus your thinking and lead to an effective communiation path.
As a test, I gave Claude a description of MuDG and this is what it came up with:
Based on the MuDG vision, I’ll create some user personas that represent potential users who might benefit from this multi-user dialectical graph platform.
MuDG User Personas
Professor Maya Chen
Background: Tenured professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at a research university Needs: Maya struggles to help students see connections across different disciplines. Her courses touch on philosophy, technology, and social sciences, but students often compartmentalize knowledge. Goals: Create collaborative learning environments where students can visualize how concepts connect across traditional subject boundaries. Frustrations: Traditional LMS platforms are linear and don’t support the kind of networked thinking she wants to encourage.
Darius Williams
Background: Self-taught software developer working at a startup Needs: Continuous learning across multiple domains (programming languages, design patterns, product management) without formal structure. Goals: Build a personal knowledge repository that grows organically as he explores new technical concepts. Frustrations: Current note-taking tools don’t effectively show relationships between concepts, making it hard to integrate new knowledge with existing expertise.
Learning Pod “Quantum Thinkers”
Background: Five graduate students from different universities who formed an online study group Needs: A shared space to collaborate on complex topics spanning quantum computing, ethics, and mathematical foundations. Goals: Collectively build understanding while maintaining individual perspectives and contributions. Frustrations: Existing collaboration tools either focus on documents (lacking conceptual structure) or are too rigid in their organization.
Eliza Hernandez
Background: High school science teacher with students of varying abilities Needs: Ways to differentiate learning while maintaining a coherent class-wide knowledge structure. Goals: Help students visualize connections between scientific concepts while allowing them to explore at their own pace and depth. Frustrations: Current educational technology treats knowledge as linear progressions rather than interconnected webs.
Marcus Johnson
Background: Researcher in emerging AI ethics working on a book Needs: A way to organize complex research across hundreds of papers, interviews, and personal insights. Goals: Identify novel connections between seemingly unrelated concepts and create a comprehensive conceptual framework. Frustrations: Traditional outlining tools force hierarchical structures that don’t reflect the networked nature of his thinking.
“Renaissance” Learning Community
Background: Online community of lifelong learners with diverse backgrounds Needs: A shared environment to explore interdisciplinary topics without centralized authority. Goals: Collaboratively build knowledge graphs that represent multiple perspectives and approaches to complex questions. Frustrations: Most online forums are structured around threads rather than interconnected concepts, making it difficult to see the bigger picture.
Each of these personas would engage with MuDG differently, but all would benefit from its networked approach to knowledge construction, collaborative features, and persistent knowledge graphs.