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

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

> 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.

Looks like a really good start to me. You seem to have covered many of
the points which the new shell is supposed to be addressing. Maybe,
before we start work on producing our own evidence around these points,
we should review the existing evidence? Could we ask the people who
presented evidence at the hackfest to contribute to this?

> 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.

Agreed, and I'd be happy to help out with this. Some of the tasks seem
more clear than others. Window management (and the grouping of windows)
is relatively definite. Another one could be application launching,
though I'm not sure what the aims are with regards to that. This could
be a good point to get together with some of the developers for a bit of
a chat.

Allan

(wallan on irc.gnome.org)



> 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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