[development] Knowing who the users are

[Neil Drumm]

This came out of a different thread; I think it is best to start a fresh
one for this.

Figuring out who Drupal's users are creates a good tool for us as
developers. We could ask ourselves "what would Drupal deployers think
about this?" and have better answers.

Basically we would need to get a general idea of what sorts of users are
out there, slice those up into categories, and write up good
descriptions of the categories. Descriptions would include things like
- computer experience
- internet use
- job description
- Drupal use
- high-level goals for Drupal

To go a step further, we could create a persona for each category of
users; a writeup of a fictional user in the category. Then our on of our
questions would become "what would Jim the Drupal deployer think about
this?" It helps the generalized categories become human again.

This has been suggested independently by jibbajabba,
http://groups.drupal.org/node/763#comment-2515.

We already have a basic set established by the old administration user
survey at question 2.1 of
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557.
However, these results are somewhere around 10 months old in a time of
exponential growth and the notes on interviews used to arrive a these
categories have been lost. But they are relatively sane and better than
nothing, so I'll use them when I need to cover our user-base in broad
strokes until there is something better.

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com/