Philosophy: Dolphin Target User Group Lisa and Simon (plus survey)

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I came across Lisa and Simon here

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Philosophy

Dolphin is a file manager focusing on usability. When reading the term Usability people often assume that the focus is on newbies and only basic features are offered. This assumption is wrong.

Target User Group

Focusing on usability means that features are discoverable and efficient to use. The feature set is defined indirectly by the target user group of Dolphin:

    Lisa: Lisa is familiar with computers since 10 years. Due to her job she has experience with Word, Excel and Outlook. At home she mainly uses the computer for browsing the web and writing e-mails. She requires a file manager for managing photos from the camera, documents she gets per e-mail or PDF-documents she downloads with a browser. Lisa knows concepts like folders and a file hierarchy, but she is not familiar with the file hierarchy of Linux.

    Simon: Simon has been a developer at a software company for 8 years. At home he uses a file manager to maintain his large collection of photos and music. Additionally he owns a small homepage and needs to transfer updated files on the FTP server. Moving and copying files are regular tasks in Simon's workflow.

Not part of the target user group of Dolphin are Fred and Jeff:

    Fred: Fred is 75 years old and is able to write e-mails and browsing the web. He is not familiar with file hierarchies and stores all his documents on the desktop.

    Jeff: Jeff is Linux-freak since the age of 16 a few years ago. He is developer and in his spare time he acts as administrator for a small company. Jeff has two monitors to keep the overview about his huge number of opened applications.

This does not mean that Fred or Jeff cannot work with Dolphin. But there might be features and concepts of Dolphin that overburden Fred. Also Jeff might miss some features which are a must-have for his daily work.

Non-Intrusive Features

Before a feature is added in Dolphin, it is checked whether the feature is mandatory for the target user group. If this is not the case, then this does not mean that the feature cannot be added; first it must be clarified whether the feature might be non-intrusive, so that it adds value for users outside the primary target user group of Dolphin. Non-intrusive is mainly related to the user interface. A feature that adds a lot of clutter to the main menu, context menus or toolbar might harm the target user group. In this case the feature will not be added.

A good example of a feature that is non-intrusive is the embedded terminal in Dolphin. It only requires one entry inside a sub menu, but adds great value for Jeff, who is not part of the target user group.

Options

Options are mandatory as the user "average Joe" does not exist. Still it is not the goal of Dolphin offering options for all kind of things. Again the focus is on the possible needs of the target user group. Each additional option makes it harder finding other options, so the same rules for features are applied to options too.

http://dolphin.kde.org/philosophy.html

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Thursday, 28 February 2013 by Sven Breitmeyer

Quo vadis, Dolphin? Preparation of the developer study.

Together with the developers of Dolphin we are planning to improve the sidebars in Dolphin with a special focus on the concept of ‘recents’.

Dolphin, the default KDE file browser, targets to be efficient and intuitive. It is designed to be most beneficial for two types of users, represented by the Personas Lisa and Simon , who are at least a bit familiar to the concept of files and folders, but not necessarily with the file structure of Linux itself.

For quick access, Dolphin contains a couple of sidebars allowing to reach different places, devices or recently used files. Recently, on some mailing lists the ‘recent sidebar’ has been the target of some discussions. The point has been made that the ‘recent sidebar’ is rarely used and it hence should be improved.

Now this is where we want to step in and find out how developers and users can contribute in finding a new and better approach for the problem of accessing files that have been used in the past. With this article, we want to outline our idea how to address this question and we would like to discuss our approach with you.

Step 1 – collecting developers ideas

First we want to conduct a survey to learn about the current ideas and feelings of the developers. Questions we want to rise are for instance:

    Is the vision and are the Personas still the target for the development of Dolphin?
    What feature ideas do the developers have?
    What purpose should be served by sidebars in general?
    Where do the developers want Dolphin to go?

Step 2 – gathering users feedback

Next we are going to do an end user survey. We would like to know things like:

   Which file browser do users prefer and for what reason?
    What do users expect of a ‘perfect’ Dolphin? Does it match with developers ideas?
    In what situation do users need more support by Dolphin?
    Do they make use of the ‘recents sidebar’? And in which situations do they need to access recent files at all?

Food for thought

With this examination we would like to find out whether the envisioned improvements are valid. We want to anonymously collect a pool of the different goals developers have for Dolphin. These results are then compared to the expectations, needs and wishes of the users towards Dolphin. An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses (SWOT analysis) will then be used to determine which aspects need improvement.

What do you think of our procedure? Anything we can enhance? Please share your experience and opinion.

http://user-prompt.com/quo-vadis-dolphin-preparation-of-the-developer-study/