[Debian-NP-Commits] r171 - trunk/docs/report/report-docbook

[micah]

Author: micah-guest
Date: Thu Jul 15 11:13:47 2004
New Revision: 171

Modified:
   trunk/docs/report/report-docbook/social_spec.xml
Log:
First docbookification of social_spec chapter


Modified: trunk/docs/report/report-docbook/social_spec.xml
==============================================================================
--- trunk/docs/report/report-docbook/social_spec.xml	(original)
+++ trunk/docs/report/report-docbook/social_spec.xml	Thu Jul 15 11:13:47 2004
@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding='UTF-8'?>
+<!DOCTYPE sect1 PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN" "docbookx.dtd">
+
+<sect1>
+  <title>Social Specification</title>
+  
+  <sect2>
+    <title>Introduction</title>
+
+    <para>"Who are we developing this for?" is an important yet often unasked
+question in software design.  The concept of personas, documented by
+A. Cooper provides a useful tool to effectively build and formalize
+the answer to that important question, producing a piece of
+documentation that can be used as a point of reference during the rest
+of design and implementation.</para>
+
+    <para>Building a persona is simple: create a prototype target user, give it
+a name, write down its profile and habits.  Put as many details as you
+can, even pointless, but anything that can make you remember it more
+easily.  The result is a persona: who you're developing for.</para>
+
+    <para>It is important that a persona be a stereotype, that it be the
+mythical "average person", that it doesn't correspond to any real
+person: personas are used to design to a specific type of user, but
+not to a specific person. Taking a real person as a reference means
+taking into account in the design also his/her unique quirks, which
+are likely not shared by the other persons you're designing for.</para>
+
+    <para>Taking a real person as a reference means designing for that person,
+and only that: it's the same difference that lies between
+custom-tailoring a dress around a specific customer or producing a
+line of trousers of a given size, for a given kind of people.</para>
+
+    <para>Sometimes it may happen that the design needs to target more than one
+persona: that's a good indicator of the need to develop different
+softwares, or multiple different interfaces to the same software.
+This is because in a good software, or at least in its interface, we
+codify the needs, the habits, the language, the knowledge, the goals,
+the tasks of its intended type of users.</para>
+
+    <para>Once the persona has been defined, it is the main scaffold of the
+design: all other design and implementation choices will depend on the
+persona. Extra care must be paid in not changing the persona during
+further development stages, because the intentions of doing so usually
+arise from the will to adapt the target user to some design
+simplification, or, surprisingly more often, from instinctive choices
+dictated by the designers' and developers' taste.</para>
+
+    <para>Choosing a persona could be seen as formalizing the "intended
+audience" part of the "social specification"of a software being
+designed.</para>
+
+    <para>Please reference Appendix B: Personas for the results of this social
+specification, and the personas that we designed during our time in
+Brazil.</para>
+
+    </sect2>
+
+</sect1>
+
+<!-- Keep this comment at the end of the file
+Local variables:
+mode: xml
+sgml-omittag:t
+sgml-shorttag:t
+sgml-namecase-general:t
+sgml-general-insert-case:lower
+sgml-minimize-attributes:nil
+sgml-always-quote-attributes:t
+sgml-parent-document:nil
+sgml-exposed-tags:nil
+sgml-local-catalogs:nil
+sgml-local-ecat-files:nil
+sgml-indent-step:1
+sgml-indent-data:1
+sgml-set-face:t
+End:
+-->