Fedora Personas - consistent user stories

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 13:30:58 UTC 2015


On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 02:59:30PM -0700, Pete Travis wrote:
> During the F21 development cycle, the Cloud[1], Server[2], and
> Workstation[3] groups assembled Product Requirements Documents that each
> developed user profiles, or personas, that reflected "typical" users for
> a given use case each group wanted to target.
> 
> Within the Fedora Docs Project, we've recently been reassessing our
> target audience, mission statement, et al, and have begun developing
> personas[4] as a tool to aid in that process.  The marketing group has
> also discussed building user stories [citation needed].
> 
> The concept of Personas seems like a universally applicable concept; in
> use by many groups, potentially useful to many more.  Refining these
> user stories and sharing them between subsets of the Fedora Project
> gives us common ground for discussing strategy and implementation goals.
> 
> As a collaboratively maintained effort, these personas will begin to
> take on character.  Instead of discussions about "the best thing for
> users", we can be more productive by using the shared idea of "Ned, new
> Linux user" or "Daryll, the distro-hopping linux enthusiast" or "Lisa,
> the stubborn sysadmin". 
> Grouping user traits into archetypes lets us track them, giving them
> names helps us remember them, and so on; hopefully since they're in
> somewhat common use we all understand the concept :) I'd like specific,
> well developed characters to become part of the conversational domain
> language of Fedora contributors.
> 
> What about this idea needs coordination?  First, we can all cooperate in
> developing the personalities, preferences, and character of the
> personas. Marketing can produce brochures demonstrating how Billy used
> Fedora for his thesis; Design can have consistent artwork to represent
> Billy, so we recognize him on sight; Workstation can target packages and
> settings for Billy's needs; QA can test for "What would Billy do?"; Docs
> can back it up with tutorials for the word processing software Billy
> wrote his term papers in, to the machine learning and robotics tools he
> advanced during graduate studies (Hey, aren't there machine learning and
> robotics SIGs too?)  The personas help disparate groups unify focus on a
> common goal, and humanize the sea of amorphous "users" we'd like to win
> over. 
> 
> [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD#User_Profiles
> [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Personas
> [3]
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD#Target_Audience
> [4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_Focus#Personas

Hi Pete,

I'm not sure if I saw any replies to this, so at risk of being not
just late but redundant: the concept of focus is a good one.

One thing I don't understand is where the "General" section personas
in [4] come from.  The page states they can be used in all categories,
but for example, I don't see Ned as being applicable to the Server's
existing categories.  But I could be misunderstanding to what
categories those personas are meant to apply.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
    The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com


More information about the outreach mailing list