Calligra/Usability and UX/Words/Personas

While using personas is an established usability practice, it's also not really applicable to a word processor. Most people expect to be able to do a lot of things, or at least be able to load documents the get from someone else.

So it doesn't make sense to define specific tasks for each persona. All want to use all the various features from time to time (if only to view them). If Words doesn't support all of them then people will not find it attractive and will not use Words as their day to day word processor either, even if their normal use may be very simple.

That said there are also features that are only useful for very select personas. But Susan the recreational user is not so simple as she might seem at first sight.

So using Personas is a rather poor design tool for a word processor. It's much more interesting to think of use cases. 50% of all usecases would belong to Susan anyway. Now for the remaining 50% we may want to invent many personas, but I think we are just going to have two personas Susan and A.D.Vance, with the latter collecting the advanced cases, for now.

End user read would then be when it's ready for Susan.

Susan

Is a recreational user with a sharp focus on web and social media Susan would use Words to write an fancy invitation for a party, and send that around as PDF or ODT or just print it. Susan would also use Words for the occasional letter, writing her resume, contribute to a document she recieved from an interest group she has joined (maybe online, maybe the local sports club).

Find the open tasks for supporting Susan on bugzilla

A. D. Vance

is a fictitional user where we for now collect use cases too advanced for Susan. In the future we might create personas for specific (set of) use cases.

Find the open tasks for supporting A.D.Vance on on this link