Personas (was: Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...)

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Calum Benson wrote:
> > > Should anyone ever get around to creating some GNOME personas
> > Someone started http://live.gnome.org/Personas months ago. 
>
> Yeesh, didn't know that.  Has anybody ever come up with an effective way 
> of keeping track of what on earth is happening on wikis, without 
> subscribing to every change?

Look at RecentChanges regularly.

It used to be available as an RSS feed, but that seems to have dropped
off with the recent upgrade.

The problem with the personas effort was that they weren't what I'd call
real personas. They were all about how the person uses GNOME, rather
than being about the person.

The idea of personas (of course, this is nothing new to Mr. Usability)
is to characterise the people you'd like to see using your software - to
get inside their skin, and do a full profile. You're not talking about a
class of people, but abbout one person, who is a member of that class.

"Geraldine always does her shopping on Friday, since she finishes work
an hour earlier. She buys lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, but ends
up throwing half of them away two weeks later because they've gone
rotten. She doesn't like cooking, so ends up going to the freezer more
often than to the veg." This is good.

"Teenager, intensive email (personal), intensive IM (msn)" is not good
profiling or persona.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
bolsh gimp org
Lyon, France