User Profiles

[Mel Chua]

Mo Duffy is working on user research for Fedora, which has a lot of 
potential overlap (and therefore synergy - yay synergy!) with our 
marketing research efforts.

The f-a-b thread starting on 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-November/msg00026.html 
is well worth reading; it's 7 messages long.

As part of that, we'll be making personas - see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(marketing) - which should help our 
marketing work a *lot*. From Mo's email:

> - Personas will help us determine what tasks our target audience wants
> to accomplish with Fedora. This will help us figure out good default
> package selections for Fedora, and also to figure out, for a given task,
> which application is best suited to get the job done.
>
> - Personas will help us determine the timbre of our messaging in both
> marketing materials and our website in order to attract the very target
> audience we are hoping to gain.

If this is something that interests you, check out 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_Research_Plan#Stakeholders and note 
that our team is listed. ;) Our first job seems to be answering these 
questions:

* 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?

So... throwing this up as a discussion thread - and would anyone like to 
pick this up (helping out Mo with the user research, in part as a 
Marketing liason) as a project, or know any marketers/designers (perhaps 
students in one of those fields?) who'd be keen on hopping in?

--Mel