User Profiles

From last week's board meeting (2009-11-05)...

* ACTION: poelcat and stickster to gear up FAB thread, getting
experienced UI/design people to help with user profiling

-------------------------------------------------------

I'm starting this thread (with Paul's help) and looking for help and a
more concrete methodology for building user profiles. Creating user
profiles is part of the project the board is helping to lead around who
Fedora's target audience is. Normally an organization would commission
a market study to help identify it's target audience. These studies
require expertise, time, and money... all of which are in short supply
to us now. With that in mind we are attempting to reach the same place,
but with a less scientific approach.


I took information from the the 2009-10-29 board meeting to start a wiki
page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Profiles


This page obviously needs a lot more work and I'm wondering if we could
get some help from the desktop and design team to know how to be best
represent these profiles and build them out.


Thanks,
John

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On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 15:40 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> From last week's board meeting (2009-11-05)...
>
> * ACTION: poelcat and stickster to gear up FAB thread, getting
> experienced UI/design people to help with user profiling
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm starting this thread (with Paul's help) and looking for help and a
> more concrete methodology for building user profiles. Creating user
> profiles is part of the project the board is helping to lead around who
> Fedora's target audience is. Normally an organization would commission
> a market study to help identify it's target audience. These studies
> require expertise, time, and money... all of which are in short supply
> to us now. With that in mind we are attempting to reach the same place,
> but with a less scientific approach.
>
> I took information from the the 2009-10-29 board meeting to start a wiki
> page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Profiles
>
> This page obviously needs a lot more work and I'm wondering if we could
> get some help from the desktop and design team to know how to be best
> represent these profiles and build them out.

I have a lot to say about this but haven't had the time yet. Now that
the stork's got F12 in his little swaddling cloth, I will have more time
to write down my thoughts on this. So, just a lame little note here to
let you know I'm gonna be chiming in

~m

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On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 15:40 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> I'm starting this thread (with Paul's help) and looking for help and a
> more concrete methodology for building user profiles. Creating user
> profiles is part of the project the board is helping to lead around who
> Fedora's target audience is. Normally an organization would commission
> a market study to help identify it's target audience. These studies
> require expertise, time, and money... all of which are in short supply
> to us now. With that in mind we are attempting to reach the same place,
> but with a less scientific approach.
>
> I took information from the the 2009-10-29 board meeting to start a wiki
> page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Profiles
>
> This page obviously needs a lot more work and I'm wondering if we could
> get some help from the desktop and design team to know how to be best
> represent these profiles and build them out.

I think when you talk about defining a target audience and user profiles
for a product, they need to be closely tied to the goals for the
product. The goal of Fedora as defined by our mission statement [1] is:

"To lead the advancement of free and open source software and content
as a collaborative community.
" * The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow.
"* The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and
spread free/libre code and content.
"* The Fedora Project succeeds through shared action on the part of
many people throughout our community."

If the chosen target audience and user profiles don't reflect that goal,
then they won't help further it.

Paul announced the Board's current working definition of Fedora's target
audience in his 26 Oct 'Target audience' mail to this list [2]. I think
this definition does a fine job of linking back to the goal of the
project. That target audience definition with my inline comments on its
relevancy to our goal is as follows:

(1) Someone who is voluntarily switching to Linux

Our strategy is not to force anyone to use Fedora. It's not going to
come pre-installed on your computer. Maybe a better way of stating this
point though is, "Someone who voluntarily wants to try another way of
running their computer." It doesn't necessarily have to be Linux. The
main point here should be, the target audience needs to be open to a
change in how they use their computer. We are trying to lead the
advancement of free software, and the folks most likely to switch to
free software (advancing it through greater ubiquity) are those who are
not afraid to undergo some change. (Let's make the change as painless as
possible though!)

(2) Someone who is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a
hacker or developer

You have to have at least a vague notion of what an operating system is
to understand what Fedora is. You shouldn't, however, have to be a
hacker to be able to spread Fedora and free software (our goal). We want
to spread free and open source software, and we won't spread it as far
and wide as possible if we limit ourselves to catering to hackers and
developers only. That is a very limiting audience when the goal is to
'spread free/libre code and content.' The body of folks interested in
technology is substantially larger than our current sphere of influence.
I interpret point #2 to mean that if you're familiar enough with
computers to comfortably place an order with Amazon.com, you should be
in our sights.

(3) Someone who is likely to collaborate in some fashion when
something's wrong with Fedora.

This collaboration can be as simple as filing a bug report using abrt or
posting a comment on a Fedora-related blog or news article. We want to
advance free software as a collaborative community, so focusing on folks
who are willing to collaborate, even just a little bit, to give back, is
important to advance that goal. This is not to say we shouldn't work on
tools such as abrt to make it easier for them to collaborate with us.
Just that they need to be receptive to engaging with us. I think this
statement could be further refined - you can collaborate when there
isn't anything wrong with Fedora as well, by blogging about Fedora or
talking about Fedora at a local LUG meeting or technology fair.

(4) Someone who wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either
using desktop applications or a Web browser.

I think the web browser point is key here. To collaborate on content in
the community, a browser is a must, and a good web browsing experience
is key to easing the anxiety of migrating platforms - if I can get my
webmail in Fedora just as (if not more) easily as I could in Windows or
on OS X, I haven't had to give it up to migrate so there's less pain in
the migration. I do think this is the weakest of the four target
audience statements, though, because 'general productivity' is a bit
nebulous/vague. But we can certainly flesh it out further, defining it
more finely and prioritizing the finer points with user studies.

I think to properly identify user profiles (and I think by user profiles
we mean personas [3] ), we need to study folks who match the 4 target
audience attributes above. I think the user profiles wiki page that John
started [4] is a good first cut at further refining 'general
productivity' in point 4 above. Rather than simply brainstorming what
'general productivity' means though, I think we should additionally
distill what kinds of tasks it means by observing folks who fit the 4
points above.

Since this message is already really long, I'm going to cut this here.
Next I am going to make a post about our options on moving forward with
a user research plan.

~m


[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview
[2]
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-October/msg00350.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas
[4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Profiles

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On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 15:06 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Since this message is already really long, I'm going to cut this here.
> Next I am going to make a post about our options on moving forward with
> a user research plan.

So first, to figure out which user research methods to use and the
research deliverables we'll want to produce, I think we need to think
about to what ends we would like to employ these personas. Here's my
stab at it:

- Personas will help us make informed design and policy decisions about
the default configuration of software in Fedora itself. We need to
consider these persona's needs and situations when making decisions
about default application behavior in Fedora, and even the look & feel /
appeal and style of the default artwork.

- Personas will help us determine what tasks our target audience wants
to accomplish with Fedora. This will help us figure out good default
package selections for Fedora, and also to figure out, for a given task,
which application is best suited to get the job done.

- Personas will help us determine the timbre of our messaging in both
marketing materials and our website in order to attract the very target
audience we are hoping to gain.

- Personas will help us streamline the main flows of the Fedora project
- making it easier to download and install Fedora itself, making it
easier to join Fedora as a contributor, and making it easy to get help
with Fedora.

- Release-engineering-wise, they can help us determine which updates are
appropriate to be released when and the appropriate severity for them.
E.g., it may be determined some sets of packages need to be under
stricter guidelines than others based on the usage patterns we discover
in our target audience.

- Can you think of any other uses?

I think the kinds of deliverables we are going to want to focus the
research towards producing then could be along these lines:

A) A task list. This is a simple list of the things people are using
Fedora to do. To help in prioritization, indications of frequency and
how widely practiced the tasks are across the user set should be given.
Tasks should be goal-centric, not application-centric. E.g., 'Use
firefox' is not a task. 'Create a logo design for my business card to
send to the printers' is a task. The task should have a clear goal.

B) Most frequently-used applications list (should include rich client /
desktop apps AND web applications.) Mugshot used to have a tool that
collected this data, and I think it's in gnome-shell now. Is there any
way we could allow users to opt-in to this sort of application usage
data collection?

C) A list of peripherals used with Fedora and what task workflows they
are a part of. (Downloading photos off of a digital camera to post on
your recipe blog and email the link to grandpa, Plugging in a scanner to
digitize old family photos and store them on a consumer NAS, filming a
music video for a school project grabbing the video off the camera
editing and uploading to youtube then emailing the teacher with the
link, connecting the computer to a TV and watching the movie with the
whole family, etc etc etc.) Some notion of how frequently the tasks are
performed / how many users perform them will be important to prioritize
efforts to streamline these workflows and produce guides / other content
for the website and marketing materials to show users how to accomplish
them with Fedora.

D) Applications commonly installed post-Fedora install. Looking at the
applications a user installs on top of Fedora, and the type of
configuration they do on a machine beyond the defaults I think would
help inform us where the default configuration / package set falls
short, and/or how packages and configurations might be chunked together
to make it easier to find them and get them installed.

E) And of course, most importantly, a set of user personas extrapolated
from all the data collected during research.

Here are some user research methods I think we could employ to gather
this kind of data. Some of them come from my set of IDEO method cards
[1]:

1) An opt-in application usage collection mechanism as described in B
above.

2) Maybe towards C and B, a listing of the Fedora-related bugzilla
components in terms of frequency folks are filing bugs against them. The
more bugs, perhaps the more visible problems are in those applications
thus they might need to be prioritized more.

3) Surveys & Questionnaires - these are easy to do, although it would be
nice if we had a survey system in our infrastructure to conduct these.

4) Personal Inventory - interview a handful of target audience members
and ask them what objects related to their computer and computing
lifestyle are most important to them and why. Produce a catalog of the
items per interviewee. This will help us come up with a task list (A)
and understand how Fedora might fit into our target audience's lives.

5) Be Your Customer - with the task list (A) we come up with, members of
the Fedora project should walk through / enact performing those tasks on
their own to understand all the issues that arise. Out of this a
document listing out issues that need to be addressed in order to make
the tasks easier to perform could be written and bugs filed as
appropriate.

6) Scenarios - write up a character-rich story involving a made up user,
who is clearly a member of the target audience, interacting with Fedora
to provide context for how Fedora is used.

7) Behavioral Archeology - look for evidence of activity based on
organization / placement of things. We could ask for people in our
target audience to send in screenshots of their desktop and take note of
what changes they made to their desktop.

8) Cultural probes - make 'camera journal kits' including a camera,
notebook, and instructions and send it out to members of the target
audience asking them to keep a photo journal of their experience with
their computer over the course of some set time period. One way of doing
this to help the participants remember to do it is to send them some
signal at frequent intervals (phone, text message, email) and ask them
to write down what they're doing on their computer as soon as they get
it.

9) Fly on the wall - sit with members of the target audience for a few
hours and simply observe how they interact with their computers without
interfering with their activities.

10) Think-Aloud Protocol study - Similar to fly on the wall but more
interactive - observe a member of the target audience interacting with
the computer and take on a mentor/apprentice role with them - with you
as the apprentice - and ask them to explain what they are doing as they
do it.

11) Extreme User Interviews - pick a set of target audience members who
are completely unfamiliar with Fedora and ask them to give it a try,
writing up their experiences.

More coming! ;-)

~m

[1] http://www.ideo.com/work/item/method-cards/

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2009/11/19 Máirín Duffy <mairin@linuxgrrl.com>:
>
> B) Most frequently-used applications list (should include rich client /
> desktop apps AND web applications.) Mugshot used to have a tool that
> collected this data, and I think it's in gnome-shell now.

It is, yep. It would be at least a few days of work to have this
appear in GNOME 2 as well, but possible.

> Is there any
> way we could allow users to opt-in to this sort of application usage
> data collection?

I think changing the current firstboot smolt screen to be "Join Fedora
Feedback" with an option set like:

[ ] Send all automatic feedback to Fedora
[ ] Send hardware profile (more information)
[ ] Send application usage (more information)
[ ] Send crash reports (more information)
[ ] Send computer performance data (more information)
[ ] Send ...

The client parts of this are not too hard; the Fedora Infrastructure
part is harder, last I talked with them about something like this they
had a lot of concerns about storage space, etc. In the big picture
all of infrastructure at the moment is contributor-scale and not
user-scale, and that's a big leap even if we're saying the user is
likely to be a contributor.

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On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 16:03 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> More coming! ;-)

Okay so I've taken a first stab at a user research plan for Fedora:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Research_Plan

Here's what I see as being the immediate next steps:

- We need to select a representative for each of the stakeholder groups
and perform the stakeholder interviews to start gathering research
questions
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Research_Plan#Stakeholders)

- We need to prioritize the research questions.

- We need to decide which research questions we're going to try to
answer first, and plan out what research methods to apply in order to
try to answer them.

- We need to plan a schedule for the research to occur under.

Does anybody want to help conduct the stakeholder views, as the first
next step?

~m

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On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 21:16 +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
> The client parts of this are not too hard; the Fedora Infrastructure
> part is harder, last I talked with them about something like this they
> had a lot of concerns about storage space, etc. In the big picture
> all of infrastructure at the moment is contributor-scale and not
> user-scale, and that's a big leap even if we're saying the user is
> likely to be a contributor.

If scale is a problem, could we, rather than tying this into first boot,
have some kind of email-based invitation system where only maybe 250
users get emails and are allowed to send data into the program?

~m

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Mo Duffy is working on user research for Fedora, which has a lot of
potential overlap (and therefore synergy - yay synergy!) with our
marketing research efforts.


The f-a-b thread starting on
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-November/msg00026.html
is well worth reading; it's 7 messages long.


As part of that, we'll be making personas - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(marketing) - which should help our
marketing work a *lot*. From Mo's email:



- Personas will help us determine what tasks our target audience wants
to accomplish with Fedora. This will help us figure out good default
package selections for Fedora, and also to figure out, for a given task,
which application is best suited to get the job done.

- Personas will help us determine the timbre of our messaging in both
marketing materials and our website in order to attract the very target
audience we are hoping to gain.


If this is something that interests you, check out
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Research_Plan#Stakeholders and note
that our team is listed. Our first job seems to be answering these
questions:


* How well do you think Fedora accomplishes its stated goals in light of
your role in the project?

* How is Fedora not meeting those goals?
* What questions do you have about Fedora's target audience that you'd
like to see answers so that your team can help get Fedora closer to its
goals?


So... throwing this up as a discussion thread - and would anyone like to
pick this up (helping out Mo with the user research, in part as a
Marketing liason) as a project, or know any marketers/designers (perhaps
students in one of those fields?) who'd be keen on hopping in?


--Mel

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On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 17:12 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Does anybody want to help conduct the stakeholder views, as the first
> next step?

So I am gonna run a hackfest on Tuesday to start hashing these out.
Please come!

http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/want-to-learn-design-skills-want-to-help-fedora-fedora-interaction-design-hackfest-tuesday-24-nov/

~m

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On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 03:06:27PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 15:40 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> > I'm starting this thread (with Paul's help) and looking for help and a
> > more concrete methodology for building user profiles. Creating user
> > profiles is part of the project the board is helping to lead around who
> > Fedora's target audience is. Normally an organization would commission
> > a market study to help identify it's target audience. These studies
> > require expertise, time, and money... all of which are in short supply
> > to us now. With that in mind we are attempting to reach the same place,
> > but with a less scientific approach.
> >
> > I took information from the the 2009-10-29 board meeting to start a wiki
> > page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Profiles
> >
> > This page obviously needs a lot more work and I'm wondering if we could
> > get some help from the desktop and design team to know how to be best
> > represent these profiles and build them out.
>
> I think when you talk about defining a target audience and user profiles
> for a product, they need to be closely tied to the goals for the
> product. The goal of Fedora as defined by our mission statement [1] is:
>
> "To lead the advancement of free and open source software and content
> as a collaborative community.
> " * The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow.
> "* The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and
> spread free/libre code and content.
> "* The Fedora Project succeeds through shared action on the part of
> many people throughout our community."
>
> If the chosen target audience and user profiles don't reflect that goal,
> then they won't help further it.

Right. And we need help describing these personas correctly, so I
appreciate the time you put into these posts. Thanks for helping us
keep the ball rolling!

I'm going to bounce back some ideas below. As you read them, can you
tell me what would be the best way to capture them in discreet bits
that help with this profiling task? I don't know whether that means
just bulletizing in notes on the wiki and figuring it out later, or
stating them in some separate, well-understood way that's specific to
user profiling.

> Paul announced the Board's current working definition of Fedora's target
> audience in his 26 Oct 'Target audience' mail to this list [2]. I think
> this definition does a fine job of linking back to the goal of the
> project. That target audience definition with my inline comments on its
> relevancy to our goal is as follows:
>
> (1) Someone who is voluntarily switching to Linux
>
> Our strategy is not to force anyone to use Fedora. It's not going to
> come pre-installed on your computer. Maybe a better way of stating this
> point though is, "Someone who voluntarily wants to try another way of
> running their computer." It doesn't necessarily have to be Linux. The
> main point here should be, the target audience needs to be open to a
> change in how they use their computer. We are trying to lead the
> advancement of free software, and the folks most likely to switch to
> free software (advancing it through greater ubiquity) are those who are
> not afraid to undergo some change. (Let's make the change as painless as
> possible though!)

So you're saying this person (we should come up with a name!) is
interested in "another way" generally, and not FOSS or Linux in
particular. That sounds sensible to me, because it is possible for
people to contribute who don't *yet* understand how FOSS works. We do
want someone who is open-minded about it, because if she's not, she
likely wouldn't spontaneously change. (And maybe wouldn't be
interested in this other way in any case.)

But yet, we're not looking to exclusively target tinkerers, "looking"
to change their computers for arbitrary reasons. Would it make sense
to describe *why* she wants to change?

> (2) Someone who is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a
> hacker or developer
>
> You have to have at least a vague notion of what an operating system is
> to understand what Fedora is. You shouldn't, however, have to be a
> hacker to be able to spread Fedora and free software (our goal). We want
> to spread free and open source software, and we won't spread it as far
> and wide as possible if we limit ourselves to catering to hackers and
> developers only. That is a very limiting audience when the goal is to
> 'spread free/libre code and content.' The body of folks interested in
> technology is substantially larger than our current sphere of influence.
> I interpret point #2 to mean that if you're familiar enough with
> computers to comfortably place an order with Amazon.com, you should be
> in our sights.

Here's what I was thinking about this point, and this may not be at
odds at all. (I like your interpretation too.) This person by
definition has to be someone who's comfortable with sticking a DVD
into their system, and potentially writing over part or all of their
hard disk. They'd need to understand the potential impact of an
installation. I'm not saying that it's then OK to go nuts and
surprise them, just that the person needs to be comfortable with the
idea that they are going to perform an action on their computer, as
part of installation, that many people don't do. (Well, more of them
do it these days than should have to, but that's another story.)

For example, Trent Reznor doesn't want to hack on his computer, he
wants to make music. But he's certainly interested in spreading
free/libre code and content, even if it's in service of just shaking
up the norm. OK, maybe you don't buy that example because Trent's
looking for music-making capabilities we can't yet provide. My point
being someone like this is certainly not a developer but the ideas we
put into practice in Fedora should sound appealing enough for Trent to
say, "My music tracks are all backed up on that other disk over there,
so they're safe, and if I hate this new thing, I'll just restore this
system anyway."

And yes, I understand that Live USB might invalidate part of this
characteristic I'm describing. Is it possible to capture the
characteristics for a persona using Live USB at the same time as we
capture those for this other persona? Can they be the same? Do they
need to be the same?

> (3) Someone who is likely to collaborate in some fashion when
> something's wrong with Fedora.
>
> This collaboration can be as simple as filing a bug report using abrt or
> posting a comment on a Fedora-related blog or news article. We want to
> advance free software as a collaborative community, so focusing on folks
> who are willing to collaborate, even just a little bit, to give back, is
> important to advance that goal. This is not to say we shouldn't work on
> tools such as abrt to make it easier for them to collaborate with us.
> Just that they need to be receptive to engaging with us. I think this
> statement could be further refined - you can collaborate when there
> isn't anything wrong with Fedora as well, by blogging about Fedora or
> talking about Fedora at a local LUG meeting or technology fair.

Good point indeed. In all the cases of Fedora you list above, I see
that communication is the common point. What about something like
this, that's less charged?

(3) Someone who is willing and able to communicate about their
experiences with Fedora.

...which captures the same idea, but is broad enough to capture a
broad spectrum of activity, from bug reporting to Ambassadorial work.

> (4) Someone who wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either
> using desktop applications or a Web browser.
>
> I think the web browser point is key here. To collaborate on content in
> the community, a browser is a must, and a good web browsing experience
> is key to easing the anxiety of migrating platforms - if I can get my
> webmail in Fedora just as (if not more) easily as I could in Windows or
> on OS X, I haven't had to give it up to migrate so there's less pain in
> the migration. I do think this is the weakest of the four target
> audience statements, though, because 'general productivity' is a bit
> nebulous/vague. But we can certainly flesh it out further, defining it
> more finely and prioritizing the finer points with user studies.

That's a very fair critique, and thanks for offering a way to refine
this point.

> I think to properly identify user profiles (and I think by user profiles
> we mean personas [3] ), we need to study folks who match the 4 target
> audience attributes above. I think the user profiles wiki page that John
> started [4] is a good first cut at further refining 'general
> productivity' in point 4 above. Rather than simply brainstorming what
> 'general productivity' means though, I think we should additionally
> distill what kinds of tasks it means by observing folks who fit the 4
> points above.
>
> Since this message is already really long, I'm going to cut this here.
> Next I am going to make a post about our options on moving forward with
> a user research plan.

I'm off to read that one next! :-)

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