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Within the scope of government-related users, we learned that ANB has two classes of users that use the program in very different ways:
- Senior Analysts
- Age: 30-40 years old
- Experience: ~15 years, very highly experienced in their field and in using ANB
- Education: most have Bachelor's degrees, many have at least one Master’s, some have PhD’s. Fields of study are mostly social sciences (i.e. sociology, anthropology, psychology). For those with two Master’s degrees, one of them is usually technical (i.e. engineering, math).
- Usage: “use it like they’ve always used it.” Senior analysts are expert users of ANB and have become very familiar with it over the years, so they are not accustomed to changes in UI. They tend to prefer seeing relationships as text data fields or in tabular format, and frequently use queries to search within the data.
- Entry-level government contractors or , enlisted military, or researchers
- Age: early- to mid-20’s
- Experience: not much experience with data analysis and ANB, if any
- Education: recent college graduates. Bachelor’s degrees.
- Usage: very visual. These users have a fast learning curve, and often rely on intuition to navigate the UI. Rather than see data as tables or text fields, they prefer to visualize relationships, i.e. as “honeycombs of influence” in a social network (people with influential relationships will be close to each other in a honeycomb visualization). Big emphasis on visualization of data and intuitive GUI.
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