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Hangout for experimental confirmation and demonstration of software, computing, and networking. The exercises don't always work out. The professor is a bumbler and the laboratory assistant is a skanky dufus.
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2004-12-12Grounding Your Work's UsabilityJared Spool: Three Important Benefits of Personas. Here's a valuable essay on the successful use of personas (made-up users or virtualized stakeholders of any sort) to provide a reality perspective for the design of a system. This is a companion to Alan Cooper's injunction to design systems for one user. Although this approach shows up more in the context of interaction design and user-interface development, it strikes me that it is meaningful for the entire system-development life cycle and for the cycle of improvement that is envisioned for a product progression. The single most-important takeaway that I recommend from this Scoble-Linked James Robertson find is that the successful introduction of a persona is a way to take the designer out of their world and into the world of the user. One limitation of open-source development is the degree to which it has developers developing for themselves. That works great when the user community consists of other like-minded developers. It doesn't turn out so well when it is offered to a broader population of users with other purposes and perspectives. The gap is often characterized as an absence of documentation. I think it goes far deeper than that, back to whether the software is even designed to be documentable and reliably usable and by whom.
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