Personas
1 Sarah Thornton
“I know there’s a story hidden in these documents – I just need a way to see the full picture, not just individual pieces.”
Background & Demographics: 34 years old, female, investigative journalist at an online news outlet, BA in Political Science, MSc in Data Journalism, single, London
Hobbies: OSINT research, podcasts on financial crime, cycling, investigative documentary series
Personality: Analytical, skeptical, persistent, deadline-driven, high attention to detail
Domain Expertise & Data Literacy: High. Regularly works with leaked documents, public records, and structured data. Comfortable with tools like Palantir, Gephi, and basic Python for data cleaning. Has covered financial crime and political corruption stories.
Technical Environment: Desktop-first (MacBook Pro), large external monitor, Chrome. Occasionally accesses reference material on mobile but does all serious work at a desk.
Frequency of Use: Intensive but episodic – uses the tool heavily during active investigations, then not at all for weeks.
Jobs (Tasks):
- Cross-reference names and institutions across hundreds of documents quickly
- Identify which individuals appear as connectors between different power circles
- Verify that every connection shown is backed by a primary source document
- Build a factual, defensible basis for publication – no speculation
Pain Points:
- Current tools (keyword search, manual document review) are slow and miss structural patterns
- Existing network visualizations she has seen are either too complex to navigate or too simplified to be useful
- Hard to distinguish meaningful connections from noise in large document sets
- Risk of publishing something that turns out to be based on misidentified entities (e.g. two different people with the same name)
Goals & Expectations:
- Quickly identify the most structurally important actors in the network without reading every document
- Be able to click on any connection and immediately see the source document it comes from
- Filter the network by domain (finance, politics, science) to focus her research
- Export findings or share a specific view with her editor as evidence
2 Marcus Hoffmann
“I followed the news about Epstein but I always felt like I only ever got fragments. I want to understand how it all fits together.”
Background & Demographics: 47 years old, male, senior project manager at an engineering firm, MBA, married with two children, Hamburg
Hobbies: Current affairs podcasts, political non-fiction, weekend hiking, chess
Personality: Curious, methodical, moderate tech comfort, values credibility and transparency over speed
Domain Expertise & Data Literacy: Moderate. Follows political and economic news closely. Comfortable with spreadsheets and basic data charts but has no programming experience. Has never used network visualization tools.
Technical Environment: Desktop at home (Windows PC), standard 1080p monitor, Firefox. Occasionally uses a tablet for reading but would not use a complex interactive tool on it.
Frequency of Use: Casual but recurring – returns to the tool every few weeks when new information surfaces in the news.
Jobs (Tasks):
- Get a comprehensible overview of who Epstein was connected to and in what contexts
- Understand why certain names keep appearing in media coverage
- Satisfy a genuine curiosity about the structural dynamics behind the story without having to read thousands of pages
Pain Points:
- Media coverage feels fragmented and driven by individual names rather than the overall structure
- Finds raw document portals overwhelming – no way to navigate or orient himself
- Worries about accidentally consuming misinformation or speculative content presented as fact
- Network graphs he has encountered online felt intimidating and unexplained
Goals & Expectations:
- A guided entry point that explains what he is looking at before he starts exploring
- Ability to click on a person and get a plain-language summary of their documented role
- Clear visual distinction between well-documented connections and weaker ones
- Confidence that everything shown comes from verifiable public documents, not interpretation