On Mon, 2007-12-24 at 10:04 -0800, Troy James Sobotka wrote: > Thorsten Wilms wrote: > > Having a clearly defined target audience would be of advantage. But I > > have to say that during my industrial design studies, this part was > > mostly guesswork. > > Then you didn't go to a very good school or for long enough.
Well, not everyone can be so terrifically well educated as you are. For projects taking 4 months max, the time you can spend worrying about your target audience is quite limited. You can do a few interviews, maybe a little survey and otherwise hope to find some statistics out there. The needs and wants of the audience and any bias in taste remain assumptions. Except if you can enlighten me with methods I don't know yet. > > We defined a number of users and thought about their > > needs and wants. That's better than having no structured base at all. > > For an operating system environment, the target audience can be very > > diverse. Even if we got to know (as opposed to just assume) that one > > important fraction of the audience is mothers between 40 and 50, who > > mainly browse the web, use email and do a little office work ... > > what exactly would that tell us about the style to go for, the means of > > communication to express what we want to say? > > You are completely missing the point here. You can both define > a 'desired' audience or cater to your existing audience if they > are different groups. You missed my point. It wasn't about several distinct groups in the audience, it's about the question what exactly any single well defined group in the audience could tell us that is relevant to theming. The usefulness of a defined target audience is rather obvious for marketing and the selection of software to ship. But I really wonder what can be in there for theming? We must assume a diverse audience, anything else wouldn't be in line with bug #1 and "Linux For Human Beings". That points in a general mainstream appeal direction with all the problems we have without a defined audience already. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about this at all, I'm just trying to either set the right expectations or learn something new to correct my opinion. > Apple has a disproportionate number of artists and designers > under their umbrella -- why? Because they have constantly > catered to the needs of that group and treated them as > 'important'. This has quite a lot to do with features and history (pioneering WYSIWYG and b/w but high-res displays), I think. > Automobile designers also must carefully > focus on how they present a product -- a rugged ATV styled > truck needs to be attractive to the quotient that is going > to purchase it and emotionally invest in the success of the > product. Hmm. What type of car would Ubuntu be? ;) > Unfortunately, in the end, the default installations presence > and audience are outside of the scope of our realm and lays > in the hands of the higher ups. Are you saying we should leave it all to them and do nothing until some artwork direction including target audience is presented to us? If not, I look forward to your constructive contribution to defining the target audience. -- Thorsten Wilms thorwil's design for free software: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/ -- ubuntu-art mailing list ubuntu-art@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
