Re: [Usability]Re: GNOME personas

[Will LaShell <will lashell net>]

On Mon, 2002-12-23 at 13:34, Havoc Pennington wrote:
<SNIP>
>  - 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.
> 

To add a perspective of this from the business application world its
a common feature to have different interfaces and views for data depending
on the "user level" of the user. Be it an administrator, a supervisor or a
data entry user.  Often times  a supervisor will want to see a separate set
of information about a client, than a data entry user.  We have found that
when we migrated part of our underwriting applications ( bank loan decisioning )
to use multiple interfaces like this, we increased the productivity by 25% or so.

The time saved from switching between screens and providing a better broad overview
definitely deferred the programming cost of doing it.

Sincerely,

Will LaShell