SEUL: Users

[Randy Heineke <heineke@vanilla.r.umn.edu>]

Three cheers for Alexandru!  Users come first.  If we wish to be invited
into their lives, we should try very hard to remeber that their
perspective is always valid and it is what we are trying to influence.
Alexandru has provided a fairly inclusive set of categories of users.  I
paraphrase them here to humanize them, rather than categorize them type 0
through type 8.  They maybe school children, relatives, friends, or
colleagues.  People we care for.  People for whom we wish the best. This
simplification may not do Alexandru justice, hopefully it may help
resolve a common undestanding of our users.

- People with no reason to use computers
- People who want computers to do easily learned tasks
- People who find computers interesting
- People who are curious about how some programs work
- People who are seeking ways of turning tasks over to computers 
- People with a need to be familiar with computers
- People with a need to use sophisticated programs
- People with a need to develop sophisticated applications
- People with a need for a sophisticated computer system

I believe that we are attempting to design a user interface for
installing, configuring, learning, using, and maintaining Linux. 
Designing a good user interface starts with defining the users and the
tasks that they wish to perform.  Once we agree on our users we will need
some help from a few volunteer users representing each category for
evaluation of our efforts.  The evaluations of people from the first
category could be the most helpful if we are able to enlist their aide.
The best interfaces are a result of an iterative process of user
evaluations and revising designs.

I also wish to commend everybody else who is ahead of the game and
looking at things like html documentation, media, tcl/tk, etc.  You are
users too.  I have seen many excellent ideas and creative solutions
proposed.  You are also doing a good job of the ground work for defining
many of the puzzle pieces that will need to fit together. 

I don't see users mentioned in any of the five job descriptions in the
monthly update.  It seems that we may be leaving out a big part of our
focus. I propose that we should have some sort of user evaluation
coordination as part of one of the current job descriptions or a new job
description for it


Regards,



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