Hey Allan, > Defining personas is very important for User-Centered Design. In fact, > it should be one of the first activities needed to build a system with > good UX, based on JJG's Elements of User Experience. We need to know > who we're designing for before we design, right? > > > There's an ongoing effort for this, but it's not gaining much > traction. Fortunately, GNOME.Asia is interested in helping out by > doing research in Asia. I hope you can help us do research in other > areas. We also found this GNOME Marketing User Survey effort. We can > build on this existing work if it's fit. > > > Let's start by surveying GNOME users about their demographics, > computing habits, what they use GNOME for, and how much they use > GNOME. Would that do? If so, let's draft the questionnaire :)
Thanks for taking this up! I'm sure that a set of personas would be beneficial. Also, I like the idea of using research to inform the creation of personas. Purely fictional accounts lack the complexity and richness of those which incorporate research results. They are also far less convincing. I see that this message has already had some responses. I'm afraid that I don't have time to go through all that right now, but I do want to give a few initial reactions. My view is that the usability project should focus on personas as a way to inform GNOME UX design. (They could maybe even become a part of the HIG.) Our first step should be to decide how to make a set of personas that are effective in that context. Then we can decide whether we can collaborate with marketing and what kinds of research strategies will be most appropriate. That said, let me jump the gun a little and say that I'm unsure that a survey is the best research approach here. In my understanding, the purpose of this research would be to add richness and validity to our personas. On the validity front, our aim should be to be able to claim that 'people like this really exist and we want GNOME to be well-suited to their needs'. This needn't require that our personas are statistical representative of the GNOME target audience (something which is beyond our practical abilities anyway). If we want to add richness to our personas, qualitative interviews or even ethnography might be more appropriate. They are better suited to producing statements like 'Mary is a busy mother. She really hates computers and wishes she could spend her time eating cheese instead of having to use one.' Interviews are more likely give you nice quotes to use. Observations give you a better sense of the contexts in which computers are used. But anyway, let's decide what work we want these personas to do and go from there. I've moved the existing persona material to the GNOME wiki [1]. It would be great to develop that page. Thanks again, Allan [1] http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Personas/ _______________________________________________ usability mailing list usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
