[Usability] follow-on - Creating Personas to Enhance GNOME's UX

[Matt Pitone <matt pitone thinkbrownstone com>]

Allan, Kirk,

I'm new to the community, just following along to learn, share and keep my HF skills sharp. 

I'd just like to plug in to support the momentum of Kirk's last post. The humanized, or market-talk aspects of persona development certainly provide a common language for group discussion and collaboration (e.g. Johnny, the 35 yr old architect with 2 kids, tech savy, mobile, CAD user). Those details provide a rapid and clear reference to that user type, keeping all team members on the same page. 

However, it's the fine-grained details that provide value to the UX design process. Specifically, the OBJECTIVE,  GOAL and TASK analysis for each "persona" will help translate to the discrete interface requirements and functionality. Furthermore, the unique capabilities and/or limitations of each User Group drive the design and UX of such features/requirements. 

It goes without saying, this high-level overview contains various layers of depth and complexity, dependent on the nature of the system in question. 

Looking forward to future discussions. 

Cheers

Matt

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 8:00 AM, <usability-request gnome org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Creating Personas to Enhance GNOME's UX (Kirk Bridger)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:57:39 -0700
From: Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>
To: Allan Caeg <allancaeg ubuntu com>
Cc: Gnome Usability <usability gnome org>, gnome-asia-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [Usability] Creating Personas to Enhance GNOME's UX
Message-ID: <4CCF9A43 4070708 shaw ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"



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

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matt pitone

think brownstone, inc 

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