User Research Plan

Fedora's Audience and Why Fedora

Fedora's Target Audience

The target Fedora user audience is people who:

1. are familiar with and comfortable interacting with computers.
2. are not afraid to try something different when it comes to technology.
3. want to change how they work with their computer.
4. are not necessarily computer hackers or developers.
5. participate in online forums such as online shopping product reviews, blogs, or movie fan sites.
6. someone who does not mind submitting a bug report as long as it's not too time-consuming.
7. are active users of the web, having accounts on a wide range of web-based applications.
8. use their computer to produce content, whether it's an expense report for work or a photo slideshow of the kids for Grandpa.

Why should the target audience be interested in Fedora?

Fedora enables people worldwide to enjoy and contribute to free and open source technology without requiring them to be computer hackers or developers. It allows them to accomplish every day personal and work-related tasks in a safe and secure manner, presenting them with a selection of the best-of-the-best free and open source software to get the job done, either pre-installed or easily installed when needed. Fedora also makes it easy for people to put their own mark on the free and open source software community, whether its participating in a user forum or filing a bug to make free and open source software better for everyone. Fedora makes free and open source software fun and easy to integrate into their lives.

Guesstimation of Top 10 User Tasks

Based on our target audience definition alone, here is a guesstimation at the Top 10 User Tasks we'll want to support. Keep in mind that these may change based on findings in user research. Some of theseare also ob-board specific tasks.

Tasks

1. Decide whether or not to download Fedora.
2. Download and install Fedora, and personalize it, configuring email, bookmarks, wallpaper, etc.etc.
3. File a bug with Fedora. Follow up on the bug and take a look at its progress.
4. Take a photo of the kids and send it to Grandpa.
5. While on a business trip, make a video call to your boyfriend/girlfriend.
6. Print out invitations to your holiday party, including directions and mailing labels for the envelopes.
7. Create a mix of tunes, save it for later use, and burn it to CD for an upcoming roadtrip.
8. Get live help with Fedora.
9. Find a good meeting time and book an appointment on your calendar for a business meeting.
10. Write and send in your weekly status report for work, and figure out what you should work on today.

Defining Success

Success for Users

• Fedora has the functionality they need to get the job done.
• Fedora is not painful to use in getting the job done.
• Fedora is enjoyable to use, and 'cool.' They *want* to use it and are happy with it.
• Fedora is a sustainable positive experience, uninterrupted by broken applications or an unusable machine which requires command line heroics or other hackery to fix

Success for the Fedora Project

• More bug reports!
• More posts on Fedora-related user forums, and more activity and blog posts and general discussion of Fedora online and off.
• More downloads of Fedora. Increased traffic to the website.
• Increased awareness and mindshare of Fedora and free & open source sofware in general.
  • How do we make this measurable? --Duffy 22:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Stakeholders

Stakeholder	Interviewer	Issues	Questions
Fedora Board		?
Fedora Desktop Team			?
Fedora QA			?
Fedora Design Team			?
Fedora Release Engineering			?
Fedora Marketing Team	tactica		?
Fedora Ambassadors			?
Fedora Spins Maintainers	ryanlerch		?
Fedora Infrastructure Team	mizmo	Inter-team communication Consistency across our web properties Content plan Explaining change.	Would like to know what kind of oversight do you (Board, maybe) want to give us over what runs in Infrastructure. How can we enable them to contribute to Fedora? (suggested) What web properties of fedoraproject.org right now are the most important to the target audience? (suggested) What parts of infrastructure is the target audience likely to use? *
Fedora Documentation Team			?
Fedora Websites Team			?
Fedora Help forums (#fedora, fedoraforum.org, Fedora Unity)			?
Current Fedora contributors			?

1. For each of these stakeholders, we'll need to ask:
   • 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?
2. We'll then need to prioritize the goals based on importance, severity, and priority.
3. Per goal, we should formulate research questions, and come up with specifics to research for each question.
4. Then we'll need to decide research methods for each questions.
5. Then we'll need to come up with a research schedule.

Interview Notes

Infrastructure

• mizmo, abadger1999, smooge
• nov 24 2009

1. How well do you think Fedora accomplishes its stated goals in light of your role in the project?
   • Not utter fail, but definitely problems.
     • two-way communication between groups can be quite poor.
       • acrimony rather than discussion between desktop developers and unix users / system administrators
         • I like that we're on the cutting edge of desktop development but too often the cutting edge is thinking about single user desktop problems when our users use us because we're a multi-user desktop/unix solution.
       • infrastructure / design team / developers - interact one-on-one rather than all three together
       • too many different views at times; lack of central vision to move forward when 20% pull one way, 20% pull the other,and 60% don't care

Resources / Meta

• Note: The methodology followed here is outlined in Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky.
• Discussion: starting 19 Nov 2009 - https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-November/msg00045.html