Friday 16 February 2007

Persona: George Norman

George is a 65 year old, recently retired accountant. He lives in a quiet village with his wife, in the middle of dense countryside, 25 minutes drive from the nearest town. The village has 2 shops, a family owned butchers and a post office.

Now that he has retired, he leads a very busy social life, he is captain of the golf club and spends at least 2 evenings there a week. Other nights during the week are filled with bridge and dinner parties. Now that he has more time on his hands, he and his wife go on holiday a lot, especially during the winter to get sun. They prefer to go on relaxing cruises, as they have no time constraints, the exact time they go is not important.

Every weekend he likes to drive to town to look around and buy any items that he needs. He only every goes to shops he knows, new shops have opened up but he never visits. He knows that the shops he visits are more tailored to his needs and he does not like the hustle and bustle of the bigger high street chains. Due to this fact, if he ever needs to purchase a product out of the ordinary, he has little idea where to go to and therefore feels that he doesn’t get a good deal because he buys the only one he can find or goes without the item completely. If he buys an expensive item such as a new television or hi-fi, he will research it and only buy the product when he is certain that it is the one he wants and he knows he is getting it at the best price, for peace of mind. If he needs small items milk or bread during the week, the post office can provide these. His wife does all the food shopping for both of them so he does not need to worry about this.

When George does go shopping, he rarely takes a list. He’s starting to find that he often forgets to buy an item which means that he either has to wait till he next goes to town or a fairly long car journey back to town.

Due to his job, George used computers a lot and is fairly competent as long as he is not asked to perform a new task. He currently likes buying books online and searching for last minute holiday deals. He still doesn’t prefer this method as he does not completely trust it, he prefers to see what he’s buying before he has bought it. As he uses the system more however, he finds that he has to do far less physical searching, books buy his favorite authors are recommended to him, more information is available to him about the products and he trusts it more.

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