Re: Tarzan and Jane - GNOME personas 2005: JANE

[Marcus Bauer <marcus bauer gmail com>]

Le mercredi 07 décembre 2005 à 14:08 +0100, Marcus Bauer a écrit :
> Sounds all very good. Here are my suggestions for five personas:
>
> Jane, 19yo, college student.
> Tarzan, 30yo, no kids, running a small business
> Doris, 35yo, two kids, parttime job freelance design
> Cary, 45yo, "decision maker desktop" IT dept. of 200 employee company
> Miss Ellie, 60yo, 4 grand children

No complaints so far, then here comes the profile of Jane:



Hello, my name is Jane and I'm 19 years old going to college. 

And the topic at hand: teenagers and Linux, Open Source, et al. First of
all, everyone needs to understand that kids aren’t going to randomly get
up and decide that they want to switch to Linux for no particular reason
at all. Teenagers share a lot of needs/wants/values with adults, though
with some differences. Philosophical issues with the production of
software will generally be a non-issue, unless the teenagers in question
were brought up under open source. Most teens don’t really care about
the difference between “free beer” and “free speech” (this analogy
doesn’t work particularly well when you’re underage/don’t drink - free
soda?). No, I’m not bashing my own age denomination here. Most teens
probably won’t even understand the difference. I knew that many Linuxes
were “free” when I started using Debian, but I didn’t understand the
philosophy. It’s only through months of use and cultural immersion that
I’ve earned an appreciation for the non-monetary values of open source.
It’s just a question of exposure. At any rate, either teens will have
someone they trust encouraging them/forcing them to look into Linux, or
they will have a practical reason to want to switch, based off some
exposure or information. For girls in particular, due to environmental
conditions and stereotypes, it’s really very unlikely that they want to
use Linux to become l337 h4×0rz. (That usually comes afterward. :-P )
My brother was always the handy guy that could help me out when I needed
it, though I generally avoided having to ask for help at all costs. 

So, what do most teenagers do on their computers? From my experience
(most of my current friends are not heavily computer literate, and
hopefully represent a decent average):

      * instant message
      * surf the web
      * on this note, being capable of accessing embedded media, java,
        flash, etc. on the web
      * multimedia - video, digital music, the like
      * on this note, downloading music - legally and/or illegally
      * gaming
      * e-mail, to a limited extent, though many teens use free
        web-based mail services such as Hotmail or Gmail
      * manage and manipulate digital photos
      * blog - in the Livejournal and MySpace sense
      * word process
      * school projects, which include presentations (sometimes
        necessarily powerpoint, due to school computers), posters, just
        general printing, etc.
      * PRINTING PICTURES
      * CD burning - mostly audio, but some data
      * iPod syncing

Mainstream teens and computing are all about the desktop, period. And
gaming. Things that aren’t likely to be as big issues: security,
productivity stuff, hobby-centric apps for things like sewing machines
(I’m not crazy, that’s my mother), etc.

Given this, a teenager would probably be using the following (also, I
should note that I’m a GNOME user, so I really don’t have enough
experience with KDE apps to include any) (this is the specifics, not the
generic desktop stuff that will be there too):

      * GAIM, or another multi-protocol messenger. Most teens are on
        either AIM or MSN for communication, at least from what I’ve
        seen
      * Firefox as the browser of choice, most likely. I like Epiphany,
        personally, but there are a few things that at least I would
        miss from FF, namely: gmail notifier, selective cookie blocking,
        session saver. Might not be an issue for the everyday user,
        though.
      * F-Spot for photo cataloguing. This app rocks.
      * GIMP, for image manipulation
      * gtkam or another gphoto2 frontend for getting photos off a
        digital camera, though there may be other solutions for this -
        and F-Spot will download off a camera too I believe, though I’ve
        never used this feature
      * There are fugly legal issues involved with multimedia, which for
        at least the present are an obstacle to multimedia and Linux.
        Most every teenager will want compatibility with Windows sound
        and video, which usually means MPlayer (and mplayerplug-in for
        Mozilla). MPlayer’s (valid) non-inclusion in distros like Debian
        makes this also more difficult.
      * OpenOffice.org and probably Abiword too.
      * the OpenClipart library - nothing like some stock images to
        quickly spice up a slide. Searching for clipart on the web is a
        pain in the ass.
      * Either Thunderbird or Evolution.
      * gtk-gnutella, as a drop-in for winMX
      * Lots of people use iTunes, but I’m not really that familiar with
        it. Rhythmbox for an iTunes-like UI, and there are plenty of
        options for iPods. iTunes music store users are out of luck,
        afaik, though. I’d rather throw in Muine or Beep Media Player
        for music.
      * WINE, optionally Crossover or winex - for games, mostly, and
        anything else that there’s just no substitute for
      * Drivel or another journal editor
      * Either graveman! or GnomeBaker, though neither is really up to
        snuff right now. K3b is supposed to be good. And Serpentine
        looks like a nice audio burning app, though I haven’t tried it
        either.
      * GNOME Photo Printer for easily printing photos

On Debian, concisely: gaim, mozilla-firefox, f-spot, gimp, gtkam,
openoffice, evolution | mozilla-thunderbird, gtk-gnutella, rhythmbox |
muine | beep-media-player, abiword, wine, drivel, graveman | gnomebaker,
gnome-photo-printer, (mplayer && mplayerplug-in && libdvdcss2)

So, what’s missing? There are a few small things: GIMP can be used for
picture-editing, but it’s really too complex for simple tasks for most
people - cropping, adjusting exposure/contrast/brightness, scaling,
rotating for the most part. Just looking at it for the first time can be
mind boggling. However, most “simple” Windows bundled-with-camera photo
apps that include editing capabilities have been pretty shitty imo.
Might as well just go for the Photoshop-drop-in and learn to do things
the right way. Also, usability is still an issue in some places: some
stuff just *doesn’t* work. We have people working on this. (I’ve never
personally used Photoshop, heh. Damn, my Windows app experience sucks.)

Unfortunately, a lot of what is lacking in Linux for teens (and others,
for that matter) is caused by proprietary suckage. iTunes. Multimedia
codecs. Flash. What is really going to solve this in the long run is
Linux and open formats becoming more mainstream. (And hopefully Flash
will die a quick death in the near future. C’mon, Adobe.) Websites are
slowly becoming more compatible with Firefox as it gains marketshare.
Hopefully this will continue to improve. When more people, even
proprietary OS-users, adopt open formats, it will clear up a hell of a
lot of ugliness with whose codec is whose, etc. (Yes, I’m going to be
optimistic on this.) For gaming, a lot can be solved using WINE for now.
To get big games natively on Linux, we need to show the world that there
is a market for them. Yes, there are open source games. Some of them are
really good. However, the big names need companies with the resources to
build them and sell them.

Also unfortunate is that teens are probably less likely to make
allowances when making a switch. We want our gain to be larger than our
loss, period. If it’s not better, why switch? We follow what is new,
exciting, and cool. We want to be able to do what our friends are doing,
without a ton of effort like making everyone else switch too. On the
flip side, we’re less likely to resist a switch because something is
unfamiliar or new.

Flip side: What advantages does Linux and OSS offer for teens? 

      * Well, most of us are poor bastards. I don’t have a real job, and
        neither do a lot of other kids. Saving money is always good.
      * Viruses! Woe to the tales of trashed and hijacked Windows boxes,
        IM worms, etc. Teens are a huge group that is likely to be into
        the sort of things that bring along unwanted baggage. I have
        seen this many times.
      * More functionality. Lots of people don’t know exactly how much
        they can do with their computer.
      * Easier access to programming environments, webservers, etc.
        Smaller audience of those who will actively look for this here.


Thanks for listening.

------------------------------------------------

Shamelessly ripped from Christine Spang's Blog. But incredibly good
read. And as I'm lazy, why invent somthing if it was already written by
somebody else...

Marcus