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

[Jacob Beauregard <deadowlsurvivor gmail com>]

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 11:13 +0000, usability-request gnome org wrote:
> 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."
> 

Would this allow people to filter out the help files they don't need to
see?