Those of us on the MA Interactive Journalism course at City will soon be given the keys to our very own website, #Interhacktives, which we’ll be entirely responsible for.

This week, Ben Whitelaw told us to imagine what a typical user of the site might be like, and then asked us to blog about them.

We’ll be the third team to control the site and have free reign over content, design, along with pretty much anything else we want to do with it.

To me, imagining a typical user seemed like a pretty foolproof way to offend anyone who might come to the site before they’ve even got there. If you do find yourself enraged by any (or all) of the following, please direct any anger towards Ben as, really, it’s his fault.

Appearance

Ben suggested we draw a picture of our typical user. As someone diagnosed with dysgraphia, I thought that this was something I really had to give a go.

So, lets get this over with:

My drawing of what I imagine a typical #Interhacktives user to be like. Sorry.

I think I should explain this so that some of the subtle details aren’t wasted on anyone.

Believe it or not, this monstrosity is meant to be fairly young. In fact, the hair is meant to be my interpretation of a “trendy” hair cut.

The eyes are red because journalists don’t have time to sleep properly.

If you can’t read the T-shirt text, it says “#HHLDN”, which our user would of course be into.

And why a T-shirt? Because our user spends all day indoors, not outdoors, honing the skills they need for that dream digital journalism job.

This also explains the jeans and beard, since our user is always online and doesn’t need to dress up for face-to-face interviews and court visits.

And the shoes? I just can’t draw shoes at all.

Personality

My typical user is reasonably young, probably in their early 20s.

They’re not necessarily already a practicing journalist, though that’s probably what they want to do eventually.

They spend most of their time online, tweeting and blogging often, and consuming news from a wide range of (mostly online) sources.

They’re also probably quite knowledgable about digital journalism before coming to our site, so they aren’t coming simply to learn from what we write about but to interact with us and help us to improve our content.

Finally, Ben suggested that we even imagine what our user eats for breakfast, but journalists definitely don’t have time to eat!