Re: [Usability] Creating Personas to Enhance GNOME's UX

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

On 11/01/2010 05:49 AM, Allan Caeg wrote:

In this case it looks like there is a desire to better understand the general Gnome user population.  I'd suggest trying to focus the personas on a market approach, rather than a software tool approach, as it seems like they'll most likely be used as marketing tools. Or perhaps take this opportunity to collect data on users and present it in a data-rich way, rather than as stereotypical users.

Sorry I didn't understand what you meant here. Can you expound?

Hi Allan,

What I mean by "market" approach is that sometimes people create "personas" for use in marketing campaigns.  Think of any ad you see where there is a stereotypical person describing how great something is.  Maybe even those Windows 7 ads where the person claims "Windows 7 was MY idea".  I'd suggest that those people are actually personas, standardized representations of users.

The personas can then be used in marketing in a couple of ways, such as trying to project a certain image or attract a certain demographic, or internally to describe specific target demographics (i.e. we want to sell to white males 35-40 with income over $40k, 2 kids, soccer coach .. oh, it's a persona called Jim!)

These kinds of personas can be created in a way that is software independent, i.e. we don't really know how those Windows 7 people actually use specific apps, just the features they use (media streaming, file sharing, etc).  In this way the personas can help designers of the overall experience, but they're not going to be much help to software developers for specific projects.  They need to know more details about the persona's specific tasks, needs, mental models, etc.

If we want to look at personas that might be useful to individual application designers (i.e. Gnome Shell, Cheese, etc) then we might want to look more closely at the kinds of data we're collecting, as simply surveying existing users in this way may not uncover the depth of information that we need to get to.  I believe it was Allan Day's response that mentioned ethnography and interviews for example.


I hope I've been a little more clear here.  If not let me know and I'll write up a response after a little more sleep :)


After all that, my opinion is that we do something to take advantage of this opportunity.  And if we want to create "personas" then we just need to be clear the type we'll be creating.  For example I see nothing wrong with creating a set of 5 personas that describe at a high level the type of user Gnome designers want to design for, and as mentioned they would fit well within the HIG.  They essentially are generalized users, not specific users of individual apps.

Kirk