Re: [Usability]GNOME personas

[Janne Morén <jan moren lucs lu se>]

I haven't read the book you refer to, but we do use something very much
like these 'personas'. In the context I have encountered the idea, they
are used strictly as a vehicle for defining necessary functionality, and
- more importantly - as the background needed for designing usability
tests. 

You would describe/define some 'typical' users (preferably with some
solid research behind it) and how they would use your application to
perform their tasks. That would be the needed raw material to write case
tasks for test subjects to follow in paper simulations of the interface.
It would also be formed early during feature design of an application.

I'm not absolutely sure we are talking about the same thing, of course.


On Tue, 2002-12-24 at 23:26, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 01:19:39PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: 
> > The very first link you mentioned warns against reusing a persona
> > intended for one application in the design for another, as their use
> > is extremely context-specific. So it sounds like picking three
> > personas for all of GNOME, as opposed to a specific piece of GNOME, is
> > missing the boat.
> 
> In saying "for GNOME" I mean "for the desktop shell", which is the
> sort of shell environment everyone uses. Panel, window manager, file
> manager, etc.
> 
> We can split up "window manager personas" and "panel personas" but on
> quick thought it doesn't make sense to me - the "shell" should be a
> single unit that's coherent. I wouldn't expect to have a different
> audience for the panel and the window manager.
> 
> Of course we need to draw some lines as to which modules use which
> personas - who uses the terminal and what are their goals? who uses
> Gnumeric? - but that's part of the exercise.
> 
> I didn't mean to assume a priori that we'd have one set of
> personas for everything that links to GTK.
> 
> Once people have read the book we should definitely consider how we
> section up the modules in terms of target audience. This could even
> drive how we do the releases ("core desktop", "fifth toe", all that
> historical question).
> 
> Guys, this is for sure hard/complicated - tough decisions, tough
> questions - but that just makes it more important to try to go through
> the exercise. But, we need people to understand the base parameters,
> so we need to wait for book-reading.
> 
> Havoc
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Tel.    +46-046 222 8588             Dr. Janne Morén (mr)
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