Users and Personas
Applications have users, though not all users perform the same tasks. Use roles to organize the users of an application to manage application security and assignments.
Note: Assigning users to appropriate roles is only one aspect of securing an application. For a complete list of security leading practices, consult the Security Checklist awareness module and the Security Checklist for Pega Platform™ deployment.
Roles and personas
A role defines how users interact with the application. Associate users with a role to determine the user interface, page permissions, and routing available to users to perform the tasks needed to process a case. Assigning application users to specific roles enables users to perform their work during case processing. Some examples of roles used during case processing are customer, caseworker, manager, and auditor.
Note: Developers and administrators also have roles that enable them to perform their work, although these roles do not affect case processing.
In Pega Platform, user interfaces are also referred to as channel interfaces. Work can be routed to work queues, which are lists of all open assignments for a group of users. Assignments are tasks that users perform.
For example, in a healthcare application, patients and doctors must be able to perform different tasks. Patients can check records and schedule appointments. Doctors can review patient records, record prescriptions, and add follow-up comments for patients after office visits. Define different roles for patients and doctors so that individual users with the appropriate role specified can see the correct user interface and have access to the desired application features.
Personas
A persona is the business representation of a role. Unlike a role, which only contains the technical details of how a typical user, such as a customer, interacts with an application, a persona provides a holistic view of that typical user. For example, an organization may define a persona to represent a typical customer. Each persona presents a unique representation, allowing the organization to identify unique needs for application users.
Note: Organizations may create multiple personas for a single role, such as Customer, to reflect different marketing approaches that may not impact application or case design.
In the following image, click the + icons to examine how personas can capture interaction needs for different types of users to influence case and application design.
When you create an application, Pega Platform provides one default persona: Users. Users are case participants that are responsible for creating and resolving cases. Create additional personas when a unique combination of channel interface, responsibilities, permissions, and routing requires differentiation from an existing persona. When you create a new persona, Pega Platform creates a set of default permissions and a work queue for the persona. You can modify the permissions and work queue and create and customize a dedicated channel interface.
Associate a persona to the channel interfaces that best satisfy the needs of the persona. Multiple personas can share a channel interface if appropriate. For example, the Customer persona lists a web mashup and a mobile app as interfaces. The Users persona shows the User Portal channel as an interface, which is shared with the Auditors, Managers, and Territory managers personas. The web mashup and mobile app interfaces can be customized to prevent access to dashboards and other features in the User Portal interface more appropriate for business users.
Users
A user is an individual who interacts with an application. You create a user with an email address and an assigned role. Multiple users are associated with the same role when they interact with the application in the same ways. For example, all customers using an insurance policy management application may be associated with the role Customers.
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