more, Ubiquity Slideshow for Ubuntu

[Phil Bull]

Hi mac_v,

Just to clarify, my post wasn't specifically aimed at you, but rather to
everyone who had replied to the thread so far. You just happened to post
last...

On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 15:21 +0530, mac_v wrote:
> > All of the discussion is about
> > "what the slideshow can do" when it should be about "how can the user
> > achieve their aim?". I think that you've decided on an implementation
> > without having a *clear* idea about what your users want, or even who
> > your users are!
> 
> On the contrary, i had written about how to achieve the users aim.
>  maybe my mail wasnt structured properly , but if your read the mails
> again...
> I had said:
[...]

The items you listed are mostly implementation details, not ways for the
user to achieve their aims. They are too tied to the slideshow concept.
Users' aims exist independent from the ways of achieving those aims;
there are usually multiple ways of achieving the same aim. A slideshow
is just one of those ways, and you shouldn't just pick an implementation
arbitrarily. You should have good reasons to use a slideshow instead of
something else.

What I'm looking for is a collection of user profiles ("personas") for
the people you are interested in developing this documentation for. You
can normally classify users into a broad "type", based on how skilled
they are, what they use the software for and how they tend to behave. A
persona details these things [1].

For each persona you then need to ask: What do they want? What are they
trying to do? You should come up with specific tasks which they might
want to carry out. You mentioned presenting new features, such as a
notify-osd demo; which users are interested in that and why? What
specific task do they have in mind which means that they need to see
information about notify-osd?

Here's a basic example of a persona, and some tasks that might be
relevant to that persona:

PERSONA: Bob is a keen photographer. His friend installed Ubuntu for him
and this is the first time he has used it. Before, he was using
Photoshop in Windows to edit images copied from his digital camera,
which he then printed out and sold. He's really good at using Photoshop,
but doesn't really understand other computer stuff like firewalls and
networks. He wants to use Ubuntu for all of his photography work.

TASKS: How can I edit my photos? My printer quality settings are wrong,
how can I change them? What can I use to organise my photos? What do I
need to install to read images from my digital camera?

Ideally, you would do some user testing to find out what tasks Bob is
interested in. Once you have all of this, THEN you can suggest an
implementation which helps Bob to achieve his tasks. This could be a
slideshow, or it could be something entirely different.

> I do not have any published documentations , but my observations are
> basically from after i'v installed Ubuntu for family and friends.

I think that it's important to use observations which you wrote down as
you watched the user, rather than your general impressions of what most
people struggle with. You also need to say which observations apply to
which persona.

> The first thing the most of them ask is>
> 1: where is the start button!
> 2: They mistake the show desktop button for the start button!
> 3: other questions are what is this places! and what are these,where is
> my computer, control panel... any basic familiar Windows Xp jargon
> 4: They did not realize that applets could be added to the panel.

Excellent! This is just the sort of thing you need to think about. But
which personas do these apply to? Do the users quickly correct
themselves, or do they need documentation to help them resolve their
problems? I think that most users will find out that the Applications
menu is equivalent to the Start menu after a few seconds of clicking,
but maybe there are some personas where they don't.

> >       * Does your user testing data indicate a need for some sort of
> >         user assistance?
> 
> Yes, since their use is more for entertainment , they usually get
> worried over the proprietary warning in the repos.
> 
> and in case they need any other softwares other than the ones in the
> default repos they find it difficult> example the medibuntu repos.

These things are covered in the system documentation. Why do you need a
slideshow to help them with this? Can't you just point them to the docs?
They won't remember the procedures involved if you present this
information in a slideshow. This is why you need to specify user
personas and aims; otherwise, you try to solve all of the world's
problems at once, and create something which is too complicated or
confusing.

I'd be really interested to see what happens if we adopt this
user-focussed, task-based method of working (see above). We don't do
this very much in the documentation at the moment, but it has the
potential to really improve our docs.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/people/philbull