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

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

> >  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.

I agree. Even if developers don't show much interest in them to begin
with, they may very well start using them if we put them out there.

> 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

I'm not familiar with the development of personas... are they supposed
to be representative of some kind of section of users? The wiki page [1]
mentions the mapping of clusters - is that a statistical analysis, or is
the representative logic more theoretical (something like an ideal type
[2])?

Allan

[1] http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/Personas
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_type