Deliverable in September 2006

In September the Mandriva case delivered a report containing, among others, a number of personas, scenarios and video prototypes that were based on the user studies conducted during the spring and summer. The relevant actors of Mandriva Club are introduced by personas. A persona is a fictitious person that represents a user group, in our case the users of Mandriva Club. The personas developed are based on the user studies made, and they are a detailed description and a visualisation of the users. They have a life, goals and scenarios where they fulfil their goals. They help focusing on the users during the design and give all stakeholders in the project a clear picture of the users' needs and requirements. The personas provide a condition for everyone in the project to have the same view of the users. They serve as a constant reminder of the users when used in the design work. The personas also "depersonalise" discussions on functionality and allow the designers to focus on designing for the personas [Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, 1999, Cooper & Reimann, About face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 2003].

For the Mandriva case we have developed two personas: Kim and André. Kim is a more recent Mandriva Linux user, who is not very skilled in searching for information, and who may not contribute with more complex information. André, on the other hand, is a skilled Mandriva Linux user, who develops open source software and knows all about searching for information.

Persona related scenarios consist of detailed descriptions of the personas' work and how they can conduct their work using the new system to be designed. The scenarios are inspirational and the goal is to describe the feeling of using the new system. For each persona, the corresponding user group and role is specified explicitly. The scenarios are described in the next section.

Prototypes in this early stage are used to provide the users with a tool to show, in action, what solutions they find relevant. "No abstract description that needs to be interpreted is necessary. The users develop prototypes based on their desires, problems, context, etc." (Schrage, Cultures of Prototyping in Bringing Design to Software, 1996) In our case, two of the prototypes have been developed by users of the Mandriva community (during a workshop in Paris). The others have been developed based on the user studies (all four in the project). All prototypes, created using pen and paper, exemplify scenarios of how the user could interact with the system that is going to be developed.

All personas, scenarios and video prototypes are presented on separate blog entries.

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