Re: [Usability]Re: GNOME personas

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Mon, 2002-12-23 at 06:46, John Fleck wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-12-23 at 07:32, Calum Benson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2002-12-23 at 13:06, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > 
> > > I guess this is a bit like an "actor" in UML-speak. Without even reading
> > > the book it seems obviously useful.
> > 
> > The hard part, of course, is deciding who GNOME's target audience is (or
> > who we want it to be), which is something we've never agreed upon enough
> > to write it down, so far... so even coming to some consensus on that
> > would be well worthwhile.
> > 
> 
> Without having read the book yet, and therefore at risk of
> misinterpreting what we're talking about, it seems that the benefit of
> this approach is that it allows us to think about "target audiences"
> (plural) and "who we want *them* to be".

Yes... but...

One of the points of the book is that designs are usually better for
everyone when the number of target audiences is limited to only a few
(rather than including everyone you might possibly want to use your
software). Focused designs tend to give better results (even for people
outside the focus) than designs that try to incorporate everyone.

-Seth