Fedora Server Personas / Target Users

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi,

I think having a set of target users or personas defined for the Fedora
Server product will help inform our decisions about the product and are
critical for its success. [1] I think at some point we should put a
discussion about personas on the meeting agenda.

To this end, I started a (quite bare) 'Personas' document on the wiki
based on previous discussion here on-list:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Personas

Let me just write a little bit about where personas should come from
(not necessarily where they come from in the resource-constrained real
world):

- Interviews with potential users, whether informal or done contextual
inquiry style
- Surveys
- Market research data
- Literature reviews (basically reading through others' research)

>From reading the discussion so far, it seems that we might be trying to
reach users who aren't current Fedora or even Linux users. We should
develop personas for these reach users, too.

All of the users, I think, are sysadmins. Maybe some developers? Things
to think about for each persona:

- What is their job role?
- What level have they attained? Are they a student, intern, junior,
senior, executive, etc.
- What kind of environment do they work in? E.g., academic?
High-pressure in-house IT department for a financial company? Are they a
consultant? Hobbyist?
- What is their technical level? RHCT / RHCE / RHCA for example (This is
just one example of how to measure this)
- Demographics - how old is someone in this position, typically?
- Referrals - how does this person find out about new technology? What /
who tips them off to try new things?
- Goals (most important) - what are they trying to do? For example, is
it a student trying to set up a web server to get a good grade on an
extra credit project? Is it a sysadmin team lead trying to minimize
outages and late-night phone calls?
- Computing platforms - what specific computing platforms do they care
about? Do any specific vendors stand out as being particularly important
to this user?
- What technology is most important for this user?

I think we probably would end up with maybe 4-5 personas (and maybe a
few other 'anti' personas - folks we are specifically not catering to
with this product) and we can refer to them in discussions moving
forward. E.g., we can talk about, for a given suggested feature, which
personas would benefits and which wouldn't, for example.

We could pitch different specific personas and drill through the above
suggested attributes to try to nail them down, or even drill through the
attributes first and see what kinds of personas shake out of that.

I hope this makes sense. What do you think?

~m

[1]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/server/2013-October/000285.html