1. Personas and Gnome

1.1. What is the problem you are trying to solve?

There has been a lot of talk over the years of trying to understand just "who" our users are. Personas are a classic way of capturing user information.

1.2. Describe your Idea/Solution

There are a few personas already created for various projects. This page serves a few purposes:

Collect links to existing personas or attempts at creating Gnome personas
Documenting ideas for using personas, including how to get buy-in from downstream stakeholders
Discussion of challenges to using and creating personas.

1.3. Approach Points

Needs to be done quickly
May need to focus on a specific project or release, rather than "Gnome personas", as then we're really just designing for everyone through all the releases

1.4. Robust Personas Notes

Determine user's current knowledge and target knowledge to accomplish their goal(s)
- Let's us determine what we want to assume the user can already do (e.g. one of the web personas below doesn't even currently use Gnome - are we designing for her?)
- Personas capture what our users currently know, and designers then design to give them the gap to achieve their target knowledge
Robust personas are not made up, but made up from real data
- Does not mean permanent - must change when project functionality changes
- Can recycle and re-use, but not duplicated across projects
Steps
1. Preparation
  - Identify designers involved in efforts
  - Know feature/functionality to focus on
  - Establish schedule
  - Identify pool of candidate informants
  - Recruit informants for study
2. Field research
  - Plan
  - Perform
3. Analyze data
  - Write summaries
  - Establish attributes
  - Map clusters
4. Build personas and scenarios
  - Choose pertinent clusters
  - Outline persona characters
  - Outline scenarios
  - Write personas and scenarios
  - Create final deliverables
5. Integrate personas into development process
  - Introduction workshop
  - Update personas and scenarios
  - Create envisionments
  - Create other requirements artifacts as needed

1.5. Related Pages

CategoryUsability