Re: Desktop personas (draft)
Le mardi 06 décembre 2005 à 21:04 -0300, Santiago Roza a écrit : cool... could you throw it in the wiki so we can build on it? i'd do it myself, but i don't think i should appear as the original author :) The whole idea behind this little draft was to show that the often requested data is already there: simply go out and have a look how the people you know are using their computers. Look your friends, your co-workers, your relatives over the shoulder and ask them about their typical usage. Then burn a couple of liveCDs, boot them in their computers and try to convince them to install them at least as dual boot. Which arguments are more and which are less successful? Which arguments convince your parents and which your high school sister? Putting the idea on the wiki is like putting it in an ivory tower. Don't discuss it, don't talk about it - just go out, test your arguments, find new ones and come back and tell which ones work. Your local linux user group may be another good starting point. Marcus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 22:44 +0100, Marcus Bauer wrote: there are three groups of desktop personas: 1. private 2. business 3. public sector I'm going to make a quick comment about personas before people go too far in this direction - if you follow Cooper (and I'm not exactly sure how personas are supposed to apply to marketing), you're not trying to define a target audience per se. What you're doing is actual characterisation, as a novelist might do: dreaming up some example users in some actual detail. The goal isn't to cover our audience 100%, but come up with a 80% or so coverage. As an example, instead of 1.1 Youngster (which is quite a general description), you would have: 1.1 Joe Evans [you should name the persona] Joe is 17 years old, and is attending high school. He uses his PC to do homework - writing up science experiments in OpenOffice.org, doing research on the web with Firefox. He has a Livejournal and uses his AOL instant messenger account with gaim to talk to his friends. He has a k750i camera phone which can also play a small number MP3s. He has a small collection of CDs and DVDs for entertainment, and occasionally plays games on his playstation. He also enjoys watching sports on TV and plays soccer every Saturday afternoon. Now, the above example obviously means this persona doesn't cover voip, the 17yo using their computer as a home studio, or any of the other myriad different users there might be. That's not the point of a persona: they're basically characters. The way you use them is along the lines of being able to enter maths equations really easily would help Joe with his homework, that kind of thing. Cooper usually says that five or so persona are more than enough: they should be pretty distinct. Inmates... also only gives a really brief overview of what they are and how they're used: to be honest, they seem mostly a kind of logic razor to me, cutting out inconsequential rubbish - stopping people focusing on corner cases and other arcania, and making them think about the big picture. It also prevents design-by-committee. A lot of what Marcus wrote down was tasks to do with media manipulation - the image manipulation program described by Inmates.. is gold, and well worth the read. I would be happy to help contribute to some personas if people think it's worth doing. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
Hi, Alex Hudson wrote: I would be happy to help contribute to some personas if people think it's worth doing. I think it is. Ideally, we could go into real depth on the personas and how they might interact with GNOME (and also how GNOME doesn't suit them), and do a smashing presentation of the results at GUADEC or some other conference, to generate a feedback cycle. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
if you follow Cooper (and I'm not exactly sure how personas are supposed to apply to marketing), you're not trying to define a target audience per se. What you're doing is actual characterisation, as a novelist might do then maybe we don't have to follow cooper strictly, because we might end up with something we can't use for marketing purposes. i haven't read the book (but i did read all the links), and i think this could be a valuable tool for describing target segments in an informal and attractive way, and then figuring out their needs, all within a flexible structure (which stimulates the flow of ideas). but if we try to be 100% strict with cooper and build live not-stereotypical characters, each one of our personas will cover 1% of our potential market, which means it'll be a useless tool. anyway, i'll try to write something before this weekend, and then throw it in the wiki to see what happens. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
Hi, Santiago Roza wrote: if you follow Cooper (and I'm not exactly sure how personas are supposed to apply to marketing), you're not trying to define a target audience per se. What you're doing is actual characterisation, as a novelist might do then maybe we don't have to follow cooper strictly, because we might end up with something we can't use for marketing purposes. I disagree. What you're doing is creating living, breathing characters which represent your target audiences. To say that a specific personage can't be representative of the needs of a class of people (at least 70% or 80%) is wrong. The advantage of personas is that it's easier to think of needs in terms of a real person, you can hope to create an emotional link between the developer and the fictional character. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
En/na Santiago Roza ha escrit: if it could be shown at guadec or something like that If the show is interesting why not. We can't compromise to put it on schedule now of course, but there will be a possibility to present a paper, or be invited directly if the GUADEC committee thinks your work needs to be shown in Vilanova. See http://guadectest.ourproject.org/guadec2006 to have an idea of the three tracks planned. Desktop personas could fit in any of the three, depending on the approach you would give to the project and the talk. Looks like a tough bone at a first glance. ;) -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
% I disagree. What you're doing is creating living, breathing characters which represent your target audiences. yeah, and i agree with this of course. what i don't like is the idea of creating living characters, at the cost of making them A LOT less representative of your target audience. for example, alex replaced marcus' typical teenager with someone who uses openoffice, firefox and gaim... that must be like 5% of 18-year-olders (who have computers), with the other 95% not even knowing that alternatives to ms office, internet explorer and msn messenger actually EXIST. alex's persona is very alive and all, but 95% non-representative... and i don't want that, because we're not writing a novel but segmenting our markets. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
Alex Hudson wrote: [It's also valid to argue that personas are not a useful tool; many people hold that viewpoint. I don't, personally, but there are significant limitations to how you can use it IMHO] There's a huge difference between personas are not a useful tool and personas are not a useful tool *for marketing*. You wouldn't figure out a marketing strategy by doing videotaped interactive user testing of our slogans, or making functional paper prototypes of marketing plans. And you wouldn't make usable software by holding a focus group meeting or buying advertising time during the Super Bowl. Usability and marketing are totally different things, and of course you're going to need different tools for them. -- Dan -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
Usability and marketing are totally different things, and of course you're going to need different tools for them. err... no. usability has everything to do with users' needs and expectations, and that has everything to do with marketing. but usability and advertising are totally different things, i agree with that. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 11:25 -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: at least from a marketing point of view, you can't ask me to forget trying to cover my userbase... that's suicidal; we'd be telling anecdotes, not segmenting anything. You're still missing the point, I think. The general idea is to cover the user base, but the idea of personas is not to cover the userbase. If you think of a bell population, you have 80% within two standard deviations (I think?). Personas are a tool whereby you attempt to design 'average' users that you think most people are going to be pretty close to. By aiming at those personas, you're trying to design something which is pretty good for most people. It's attempting to recognise that the distribution of wants, needs and skills across human populations isn't uniform - most people want roughly the same thing, most people have roughly the same skills (for some definition of roughly), and that there is some polarisation there too. Personas attempt to cover a large range of people, but also includes a weighting of what you think the most important issues are. You can't make everyone happy all the time; personas is just a tool to help figure out how to prioritise who to make happy when, if you see what I mean. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
[snip] You can't make everyone happy all the time; personas is just a tool to help figure out how to prioritise who to make happy when, if you see what I mean. And a way for developers to remember that they should worry about the _goals_ of real people. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
If you think of a bell population, you have 80% within two standard deviations (I think?). yeah 80% is good; what i don't want is personas who're so individual and pretty and unique :) that they don't reflect the userbase at all. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: Desktop personas (draft)
cool... could you throw it in the wiki so we can build on it? i'd do it myself, but i don't think i should appear as the original author :) -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
