Why Personas?

Personas are hypotheses that we developed to act as a mental proxy for the different types of target users of our products. By studying different personas (or personae), we identify important workflows and use cases that are relevant. These workflows can then help determine requirements and features for a product. By deciding which personas are the ones we want to emphasize, we then have a means for prioritizing the workflows and hence requirements and features.

Goals of for doing Personas in 0.6:

1. As a communication vehicle to explain the rationale behind our design decisions. We hope to show in a concrete, straight-forward manner, what different users are looking for, and how we cater to them in terms of product features. This will help align the organization internally and provide another medium for communication to our community.
2. As a high-level tool and framework for Mimi to do product design. She will use findings in this exercise to fine-tune design decisions she will likely need to consider as 0.6 proceeds (e.g. based on people's usage patterns, figure out what features need to be really accessible and what we can hide a little, determine if all shared items should appear in the All collection, etc.)
3. As an additional product planning and feature prioritization tool mid-way and beyond 0.6. We will likely encounters change to our original 0.6 plan along the way. This exercise will act as a prioritization framework to make such decisions.
4. By experimenting with personas in a small way in 0.6, we can judge the efficacy of this tool in the context of OSAF without being disruptive. We can then determine if this is a useful process beyond 0.6.

Non-goals:

1. Not meant to validate or invalidate our current agreed upon plan for 0.6. If this exercise is successful, we should use the process of creating personas to help inform planning for future releases but not for 0.6

Assumptions:

• we are focused on users for 0.6. Little attention is paid to users beyond 0.6 initially.
• 0.6 is mainly a dog food release [is this still the case], so we are primarily interested in internal OSAF folks, as a first pass to doing such analysis

Plan:

1. Write up descriptions and workflows for different personas relevant to 0.6. Identified personas are (placeholder names):
   • CEO/Principal (e.g. Mitch)
   • Personal assistant to above (e.g. Esther)
   • manager (e.g. Lisa, Sheila)
   • office coordinator (e.g. Blue)
   • worker bee (e.g. Andi, Pieter)
2. We will help flesh out these personas by answering questions such as the ones listed below, which we mostly have the answers for and will seek answers for the few we don't.
3. We will associate important calendaring workflows to these personas. A list of key workflows has already been provided by Mitch at: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/ZeroPointSixCalendarUseCases We will use this as a reference and build upon it.
4. We will attempt a prioritization of these workflows, through a prioritization of the personas and an analysis of the dependencies and associations of the different workflows.
5. We will attempt to show how the 0.6 implementation caters to important workflows discovered in (4). We will also show open design questions we have that we hope will be at least answered partly through empirical usage of the 0.6 release. Such empirical data will help further fine tune our future designs.
6. By sharing the results of this project with our community, we hope to engage our community to further develop additional persona and our understanding of target users.

We hope to complete a first draft of this exercise by early May. ___

Questions for (2) [draft notes]

IDENTIFYING WITH A PERSONA

Do you organize meetings for other people that you yourself are not attending?

Do you usually have the busiest schedule of all of the people you're meeting with?

YOUR SCHEDULE

How many meetings do you organize a week? How many do you organize for someone else?

How many meetings do you attend a week?

How many standing meetings do you have?

WHAT YOU PUT ON YOUR CALENDAR

Do you put all of your meetings on your calendar?

Other than meetings, what else do you put on your calendar? Doctor's appointments. Reminders to pay bills. Holidays. Social events. Calendar information relating to other people, like a spouse.

Do you put things on the calendar before they've been confirmed or do you only add them after confirmation?

How do you keep track of the calendar events that haven't been confirmed but eventually need to get put on the calendar?

WHY DO YOU LOOK AT YOUR CALENDAR

How often do you refer to your calendar?

For what reasons? -Review the coming day, week? -Assess how busy you are to decided if you can take on more responsibility? -Check to see if you have an upcoming committment. -Look for information you entered in your calendar. (ie Meeting agenda)

SHARING CALENDAR INFORMATION

Who is constantly asking for information that is on your calendar. Spouse? Assistant? Co-worker?

WORKFLOWS How do you set up meetings for yourself?

How do you set up meetings for someone else?

how do you schedule appointments with other people?

what tools do you use, if any, to keep track of your schedule? (this includes pen and paper, to pocket organizers to PC calendaring apps)

if you do use a PC calendaring app (e.g. iCal), what are the features do you use most often? in what context do you use them?

if you do not use a PC calendar app, why not? have you used one before? have you considered using one?