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

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

Hi everyone,

I've thrown together a few notes I've made about the GnomeShell blog 
entry, including a few stabs at what I think the feature/function is 
that they're trying to work on.

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Personas

I've love some input or feedback here.  Before we start picking 
participants to help build personas we need to know what kinds of things 
we want to focus on for these personas.

On another tangent, the time seems ripe for some basic usability tests 
with either paper prototypes or the code they're building.  It would be 
great if we could figure out who we should discuss/test with as they'd 
be great sources of info for the personas too.  Frankly I'm still not 
clear on the tasks they're trying to build around.

Thoughts and ideas?

Kirk



Kirk Bridger wrote:
> It sounds like there's at least some interest in putting together 
> something like personas - what feature set do we want to focus on.  or 
> put another way, what feature set seems to be the one the devs are 
> really gunning for?
>
> The Gnome Shell?
>
> http://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/
>
> http://www.vuntz.net/journal/2008/10/22/494-desktop-shell-from-the-user-experience-hackfest-general-overview 
>
>
> Is this what we want to focus on?
>
> If so, do we want to add a page somewhere on the wiki for a scratch 
> pad, to start getting our thoughts down in terms of steps to do, info 
> to gather, people to talk to and extract attributes from?
>
> Or is there a better way to collaborate on these?
>
> Kirk
>
>
>
> Calum Benson wrote:
> > On 12 Nov 2008, at 14:25, Allan Day wrote:
> > > I'm not familiar with the development of personas... are they supposed
> > > to be representative of some kind of section of users?
> >
> >
> > Personas are archetypes that don't necessarily map directly on to any 
> > one 'real' user.  But the union of the personas you use on any one 
> > project should, hopefully, be representative of that project's target 
> > audience.
> >
> > I'd recommend reading the blog entries at cooper.com about persona 
> > development:
> > <http://www.cooper.com/journal/personas/>
> >
> > And here are a couple of persona-related podcasts I've listened to 
> > recently, that were quite informative:
> > <http://www.uxpod.com/index.php?post_id=160220>
> > <http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/21/usability-tools-podcast-robust-personas/> 
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