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 -- -- Pete Travis - Fedora Docs Project Leader - 'randomuser' on freenode - immanetize@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ outreach mailing list outreach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach
