Personas and Gnome
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.
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.
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
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
- Preparation
- Identify designers involved in efforts
- Know feature/functionality to focus on
- Establish schedule
- Identify pool of candidate informants
- Recruit informants for study
- Field research
- Plan
- Perform
- Analyze data
- Write summaries
- Establish attributes
- Map clusters
- Build personas and scenarios
- Choose pertinent clusters
- Outline persona characters
- Outline scenarios
- Write personas and scenarios
- Create final deliverables
- Integrate personas into development process
- Introduction workshop
- Update personas and scenarios
- Create envisionments
- Create other requirements artifacts as needed
- Preparation