Re: [Usability]Re: GNOME personas

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 07:18:42AM +1100, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote: 
> I think deciding the various target audiences is not too painful; but
> the large number of them is going to make life difficult. We can't
> please them all at once and continually designing to solely please one
> particular group at the expense of others all the time is less than
> optimal. So I forsee some lively conversation when we come up with
> various personas that are essentially conflicting in their requirements
> and sometimes somebody writes good software that doesn't placate the Joe
> Windows User persona. Still, I'll leave my prejudices at the door until
> people have read the book and/or the websites Havoc posted.

A couple points about that though:

 - there's some room to design for some users first, and some users
   later. For example, I think we might be looking at office users
   with a sysadmin handy first, and home users later. For this
   exercise, we want to pick 3 personas to be primary *now*.

 - Cooper advocates a different interface for each distinct persona.
   One thing we may learn from this is that we *need* to do two
   versions of some apps or features! (Or leave some users to other
   projects.) If there are inherent conflicts, maybe we do. That would
   be interesting in itself. We already have some movement along those
   lines (metacity/sawfish, galeon/epiphany, etc.) - personas could
   clarify if/when we need those kind of splits and why.

One basic assumption/premise is that if you try to design for everyone
at once, you end up de facto designing for people who understand the
"implementation model" - i.e. you end up just exposing how the
computer works in all its detail, so people can then assemble the
parts how they see fit. But this is just desiging for other
programmers - it's a de facto choice of the programmer persona, it's
not genuinely a design that's suitable for everyone.

Havoc