Fedora Personas - consistent user stories

[Pete Travis]

On 03/16/2015 07:30 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 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.
>

We're looking at it from a different perspective than the Server WG, I
think.  We're looking at who the users [we are exposed to] are and what
kind of questions they ask, rather than who we want the users to be. 
They are targeting people with racks and responsibilities that want to
get a jumpstart on the future of their organization's infrastructure.  
However, there are plenty of end users installing Fedora Server
because.... well, "Server" == "Minimal" and they want to build up their
packageset from scratch, or they want to have a samba share at home, or
they just want to see what it does.  Some of that can be addressed by
messaging to help select an appropriate product - I'm continually
annoyed by the "I installed $EDITION but I actually want something
completely different" support questions - but there's also value in
meeting our users halfway.

The "Ned" would help us target novice end users that want to leverage
Fedora for more common server (as opposed to Server) use cases; the
closet shelf instead of the rack.   Maybe the Server WG would prefer
that we exclusively target Server documentation to Cockpit/Rolekit
features and their usage in the workplace, and leave things like media
servers, fileservers, etc out of the Edition's message; I'd argue that
people bring ideas to work from home,  we have tools for it all,
mindshare is worth building here, but it's a conversation we should
have.  Ned doesn't become Carl without a little help, so we can show him
Fedora's potential.

Anyway, I think the general personas are intended to be three vaguely
encompassing categories for users, without development of the story
about their relation to any specific feature or edition. But since you
asked....

-- 
-- Pete