Dear Council,

For those who don't know me, I work for Red Hat as a designer in the Desktop Team. I've recently been doing some user experience and product research, which has Fedora Workstation as one of its main areas of interest.

I'm reaching out to let you know that this work is happening, and to give you an opportunity to have input. The work is still in its initial stages (stage 1 of 4, to be exact) and I plan on sharing my research results with the Fedora community once it is complete.

I look forward to hearing your feedback. Below you'll find a brief summary of the research goals and methodology.

Best wishes,

Allan Day
--
Fedora desktop research introduction

Research goals

The research has three high-level goals:

• Inform desktop strategy: identify what is important to our target users: their requirements, desires, objectives
• Gain a better understanding of our target audience: identify how different user groups differ in their requirements and attitudes
  
• Lay the foundations for future research, by identifying future research topics and creating a sampling framework

Research methodology

The research is interview-based. Interviews are in-depth, semi-structured, and being held face-to-face. This is designed to allow new insights to be discovered. The research is intended to be exploratory and focused on user perspectives.

Interviews are being conducted with four groups:

1. Front-end web developers
2. Computer science undergraduate students
3. Operating system developers
4. Non-technical office workers

These groups are designed to cover a range of user characteristics. For practical reasons, they only cover of subset of Fedora Workstation users.

Research outputs

Research findings will be written up and made available to the Fedora community, probably in the form of blog posts but also more permanent records (likely including the Fedora wiki). It is also hoped that they will be presented at Flock.