Re: [Usability] Gnome Shell update and personas - focus or distraction?

["Diego Moya" <turingt gmail com>]

2008/11/12 Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>:
>  Of course there's no point in doing it if the developers aren't interested
> in using the personas to help guide the direction of development, but I
> wanted to hear some thoughts from this mailing list first.

I'd say that we should create some personas, even if developers don't
show interest in them. Personas provide a strong narrative focus, and
developers are going to argue about how "aunt Millie" or "grandma" are
going to use a particular interface element.

It would be better to have those target users better defined so that
you can refer to a particular and consistent set of assumptions,
instead of changing the perceived user abilities during the discussion
to match the preferred

Also, personas trigger empathy, even for developers :-)
This is useful when designing or using the scenarios in which an
interface will be used. Pruitt & Grudin say it better:
http://research.microsoft.com/users/jgrudin/publications/personas/Pruitt-Grudin.pdf

"Beyond engaging the attention of team members, a detailed persona
enables them to draw on experience to fill in more aspects of behavior
than are included in a scenario or specification. Thus, well crafted
personas are generative. In the case of scenario creation, individuals
across a product team can independently generate appropriate and
complementary scenarios for seemingly disparate areas of a large,
multifaceted product."