Re: [gftp] marketing: target use case and target audience of gftp

[Alonso Acuña <alonso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I use KDE and cannot find any good alternative to gFTP.  Its support for
ftp over ssh is a selling point for me.

On 03/25/2010 08:28 PM, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> Hello.
>
> Glad to see someone who start to work on technical improvements. I wish
> to help on the marketing side.
>
> gftp have to have a clear target audience. A typical explanation of "is
> just another ftp software" would win the audience who finds fun trying
> yet another thing but not people who look for a tool for particular
> case. Since gnome have ftp support, why bother to have an FTP software?
> For me there are at least these reasons:
>
> FEATURE LIST
>
>    1. gftp offer fine-grain control over overwrite/continue/skip option
>       on each files, when uploading lots of files. This is useful for
>       website management.
>    2. gftp endures broken connection better and show connection broken
>       (instead of hiding it) on the user interface.
>    3. gftp supports continue (reget, reput), good for transferring large
>       files.
>
> This list is incomplete, but is only concluded from my own use cases, I
> hope other people contribute how they /uses/ (not only how they
> develops) gftp, and get a complete use case table.
>
> When we know the use case, we can conclude who are our target audience.
> >From above 3 use case I consider
>
> TARGET AUDIENCE LIST
>
>    1. web designers
>    2. video file manager (transfer large file over network)
>    3. those who suffer from low quality connection are the target users.
>
> >From this on we can further think what other features these target
> audience would need. For example
>
> FEATURE LIST BASED ON TARGET AUDIENCES
>
>    1. a web designer might further need mirroring feature, removing
>       files that was removed locally, she might also need exclusion file
>       table in the bookmark to exclude '.svn' folders.
>    2. video file manager might want to run gftp in system tray for a day
>       or two, and get a report afterwards about upload progress. One can
>       argue what she really need is gnu screen, but suppose she could
>       not manage command line tools...
>    3. those who suffer from low quality connection might need to
>       download file in many runs, perhaps they need a feature to recover
>       a transfer session after gftp restarted, by using, e.g. save
>       current transfer progress to a file and restart it later.
>
> This analysis gives two things:
>
> LIST OF REASONS TO DO USE CASE ANALYSIS
>
>    1. Developers know what feature they should work on if they intend to
>       reach more users and help users solve more problems, or solve them
>       better.
>    2. Webmaster who run gftp website knows how to describe the product
>       so that others decide to use it.
>
> I did not get a full analysis done, there are many other use cases and
> audiences that are not included, but you see my method, I had been
> working on software requirement identification for many years, knows the
> methods and can sense gftp have much more uses than it currently can
> handle. I hope I can contribute by making it more popular on the means
> other than developing code.
>