[Users] (no subject)

[Dave Neary]

Hi Charlie,

On 02/21/2013 07:13 PM, Charlie wrote:
> Wow.  That's an incredibly tight focus!
>
> I've always recommended targeting "all human beings" (including blind,
> color-blind, and physically handicapped people) mostly because I think
> those damn Martians and Jovians are a bunch of whiners.  They should
> stop complaining about being excluded and just learn to live at one
> Earth gravity like normal right-thinking people.  Working towards a
> maximally useful product wastes resources, and the aliens will never
> buy Earth goods anyway.

Thanks for the feedback - as the guy who gave the presentation,perhaps I 
can explain.

Projects have users, and those users have things they need/want to do.

If you can think of the people and the problems they have, you can 
figure out what their needs are, and whether you meet them.

Let me give you an example. Let's say I am bringing a new lollipop to 
the market. I *could* say to myself "anyone could buy this - some people 
do not like sweet things, so it should not be too sweet, but other 
people like spicy things, so it should be a bit spicy, etc."

I could, instead, say "who has the problem which is solved by a 
lollipop?" I might decide one of the problems is "I want a lollipop 
stick", and then I'm thinking of people who might want lollipop sticks, 
and why, and whether I want to meet their needs. I would probably decide 
"children like sweet things. I need to consider the needs of a child who 
wants a lollipop".

Children are small, so the lollipops should not be high up. They like 
sweet things. Based on interviews with kids, I ascertain that the 
favourite flavours of 7 and 8 year old kids are banana, chili and 
strawberry. So I decide to make lollipops basedon these three flavours.

When I try to figure out how the kids will get the lollys, I realise 
that they don't buy lollipops, their parents do. So I make sure the 
lollipops are at eye level for an 8yo (not high on a shelf), in a place 
where the parents have no choice but to stand and wait (beside the cash 
register) and are priced at a level that a parent will add one to the 
shopping just to shut the kid up.

Lollipops do not have one target audience. Perhaps I'm also targeting 
college kids studying for exams who want a coffee flavoured lolly. I 
make sure that university campuses get lots of these at the right time 
of the year, and that they are also available in the 24h service 
stations near the universities.

By making a range of personas, I cover the entirity of my target 
audience. oVirt has lots of target user types:
* Sysadmins who will install and maintain virt infrastructure for medium 
sized companies
* Sysadmins who will install and maintain virt infrastructure for large 
companies
* Consultants in a service company who want to install and support virt 
for their clients (perhaps as a remote admin tool?)
* University CIO who wants to have a nice VDI solution for his students
* Developers/testers/??? working in a medium size enterprise, who want 
to spin up and down VMs at will, create them from templates and images, 
live snapshot to save state, etc
* ISP clients, who have access to the VMs their ISP created for them, 
and who just need to be able to shut down and restart, and also monitor 
resource usage.
* Developers who want to integrate their stuff into market virt 
solutions, to grow the market for their stuff
* Developers of core code

Some of these, we can take care of my addressing another group. For 
example, maybe the medium sized company's needs are taken care of by the 
same features as the big company, and maybe not. But we can identify 3 
or 4 personas for oVirt which cover most of them - and the UI plug-in 
author is one of them.

Thanks for your feedback!
A pesky Martian.

-- 
Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13