Re: [GMG-Devel] Feature design

[Christopher Allan Webber]

So we had a good conversation about this at the last meeting, and I
thought I'd summarize it here!

A short recap:
 - Everyone in the channel seems to agree that the "usage stories"
   aspect of things is a good way of looking at things, and that we should
   move forward with that direction.
 - Jef points out that we should "know our audience" and thus we should
   have "personas"... basically prebuilt "users" of our software shown
   in examples.  For example, Shaquannah is an artist who XYZ, Gavroche
   is a sysadmin who XYZ, Avea is a programmer who XYZ, Machalus is a
   business owner who XYZ... this way we have a good sense of what kind
   of users do what, which will make it easier to construct such
   stories.  I agree, though I think we should be careful in
   constructing such personas to avoid annoying sexist cliches of
   "tech-incompetent mom".  Jef also points that by constructing
   carefully constructed personas we can avoid that.
 - Jef also points out that a lot of projects have design principles or
   design values such as:
     http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?854

   "i.e. that it's difficult to make decisions when you don't know
    what mediagoblin's goals are, on a high level. I'm not sure
    how effective design principles are, but they're meant to help
    with that"

To some extent, I think I'll be doing quite a bit of ticketing triaging
shortly after the campaign ends (and I get the rewards stuff filtered
out of the way) and trying to set things... I'll be working that into
the above.  But also, quasi-action-items are:
 - start wome wiki pages that contain descriptions of this
 - actually start making tickets actually involve
   narratives/stories when we do it!
 - create a wiki page with personas??
 - create a wiki page that starts defining our design principles

Anyway, that's the meeting results.  Thoughts?
 - Chris