[Strategic] Use cases and personas for a redesign of osm.org (was Re: [Design] SotM11: BoF meeting)

[Kai Krueger]

On 9/13/11 2:50 PM, Michal Migurski wrote:
[...]
>>> Need to know use cases
>> Agreed - we just need to be careful to make it the use cases we want to support rather than all the use cases anybody on the talk list would like us to support.
> More broadly, we talked about the idea that it made little sense to move forward on potential designs before identifying the audiences who needed to be served by these designs. It can be quite contentious to move directly toward proposed solutions unless we successfully de-personalize the issues through the use of tools like personas and use-cases.
>
> Examples of personas might include experienced editors, hopeful newbies, downstream data consumers, upstream bulk data producers, etc.
Not that it matters too much under who's umbreller this happens, but 
perhaps the strategic working group (cc'ed in this thread) can take the 
lead on trying to come up with specific use cases and personas the 
redesigned website should cater for and thus which features it should offer.

Once that design brief is established, one can start thinking about the 
actual design.
>
>>> Get the community very involved in Round 0: creating a design brief.
>>> Ask a survey. What do you want on osm.org<http://osm.org>  % of how much
>>> you want it
>> If you go down this route somebody has to be ready to stand up to the community and say no to bad ideas, no matter how much support they get.
>>
>> I can guarantee you, based on past experience, that you will get a lot of ideas, some of which will have lots of vocal support, but which will still be bad ideas.
> The phrasing of questions here is critical. I believe it would be counter productive to ask people what they want the OSM site to look like. Instead, we should ask experiential questions that get closer to people's needs. Examples: how recently did you use the website, why did you go there, how long did it take you to find what you were looking for, etc. There's also a risk here of missing out on participants who might not even be aware of the OSM project in the first place.
>
>
> [...]
>>> Can we get stats from Grant/Matt
>> The stats that we have are here:
>>
>> http://stats.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=www.openstreetmap.org
>>
>> Not sure that they help much though.
>
> That's great!
>
> The thought here was that if we had site usage stats at the app level along the lines of what http://mixpanel.com provides, then it would be possible to judge the long-term effectiveness of a new site design based on real, meaningful metrics such as retention, repeat visits, signup rate, and others. The choice of what those metrics actually are is clearly up for discussion and should happen early.
>
> My mental image of a design process has three stages:
> 	1. Develop personas and choose metrics, with community participation, data-gathering, etc. The messy part.
> 	2. Appoint a directly-responsible group or individual to act on #1, produce and launch a new site. The fast part.
> 	3. Observe metrics and tweak the hell out of #2 slowly, over time in response to changes. The long part.
>
> -mike.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
>                   415.558.1610
>
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