Re: Creating Personas to Enhance GNOME's UX

On 11/01/2010 05:49 AM, Allan Caeg wrote:
>
>     In this case it looks like there is a desire to better understand
>     the general Gnome user population.  I'd suggest trying to focus
>     the personas on a market approach, rather than a software tool
>     approach, as it seems like they'll most likely be used as
>     marketing tools. Or perhaps take this opportunity to collect data
>     on users and present it in a data-rich way, rather than as
>     stereotypical users.
>
>
> Sorry I didn't understand what you meant here. Can you expound?
>
>

Hi Allan,

What I mean by "market" approach is that sometimes people create 
"personas" for use in marketing campaigns.  Think of any ad you see 
where there is a stereotypical person describing how great something 
is.  Maybe even those Windows 7 ads where the person claims "Windows 7 
was MY idea".  I'd suggest that those people are actually personas, 
standardized representations of users.

The personas can then be used in marketing in a couple of ways, such as 
trying to project a certain image or attract a certain demographic, or 
internally to describe specific target demographics (i.e. we want to 
sell to white males 35-40 with income over $40k, 2 kids, soccer coach .. 
oh, it's a persona called Jim!)

These kinds of personas can be created in a way that is software 
independent, i.e. we don't really know how those Windows 7 people 
actually use specific apps, just the features they use (media streaming, 
file sharing, etc).  In this way the personas can help designers of the 
overall experience, but they're not going to be much help to software 
developers for specific projects.  They need to know more details about 
the persona's specific tasks, needs, mental models, etc.

If we want to look at personas that might be useful to individual 
application designers (i.e. Gnome Shell, Cheese, etc) then we might want 
to look more closely at the kinds of data we're collecting, as simply 
surveying existing users in this way may not uncover the depth of 
information that we need to get to.  I believe it was Allan Day's 
response that mentioned ethnography and interviews for example.


I hope I've been a little more clear here.  If not let me know and I'll 
write up a response after a little more sleep :)


After all that, my opinion is that we do /something/ to take advantage 
of this opportunity.  And if we want to create "personas" then we just 
need to be clear the type we'll be creating.  For example I see nothing 
wrong with creating a set of 5 personas that describe at a high level 
the type of user Gnome designers want to design for, and as mentioned 
they would fit well within the HIG.  They essentially are generalized 
users, not specific users of individual apps.

Kirk

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