Re: [Usability]Re: GNOME personas

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 03:34:16PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I agree with all of this. I'm really trying not to start this
conversation now, since I like your earlier plan of deciding to discuss
it in a month when people have had time to do their homework.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
I've got a mind like a... a... what's that thing called?