User Analysis

The aim of this page is to present a comprehensive view of the goals of this project and what we need to do to properly cater to our target audience.

Mission statement

"...targeted at new users to Linux & RIT students, faculty, and staff"

Who are we targeting more specifically?

• RIT
  • Primary focus on students
    • Primary focus on new users (little to no Linux/FOSS experience)
      • CS, SE, etc.
      • Make RIT-specific stuff usable
      • Help bridge RIT & FOSS
        • We have a good amount of ability ourselves
        • Help make better reports for upstream, etc.
    • Some, but less, focus on users that are experienced enough to toy around with their system
      • These people can also be redirected to RITlug proper if they have issues outside this project's scope

What makes us "us"?

• Series of packages
  • Streamline software install (via dnf) for software requiring manual work to install normally.
• Out-of-box experience
  • Experience should be familiar to new users
  • Brand (catering to target audience)
    • Buzzwords: "easy (as in usable)," "easy (as in friendly [to use])," "educational/introductory [to Linux]"
• Anything not part of the above gets redirected to upstream

Other objectives

• Expose audience to Linux & FOSS projects
  • Engage audience in the above (particular focus on RITlug)
    • Help them understand what it is and why it's important
    • Help fix issues they may encounter (keep them from being turned off)
    • Show relevance to their major/program of study
• Heavy marketing/etc. will be required
  • They're probably already using at least some of it
  • Resume/recruiting benefits
• Good documentation will be required

Context analysis

+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+
|                 | Helpful                                        | Harmful                                             |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+
| Internal origin | * Complete Linux install                       | * Working on better organization/clear goals        |
|                 | * Have people in many target programs          |                                                     |
|                 | * We have the infrastructure to package things |                                                     |
|                 | * We are able to to write software/scripts     |                                                     |
|                 | * We can modify the base install               |                                                     |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+
| External origin | * In target community                          | * Target audience needs software w/o packages       |
|                 | * Great FOSS software exists                   | * Fedora/build tools break too often                |
|                 | * Many existing Linux/FOSS advocates           | * Course software specified by not-us               |
|                 |   * inc. companies                             |   * Can't guarantee it runs on Linux                |
|                 |                                                |   * Proprietary?                                    |
|                 |                                                | * We can't control target community                 |
|                 |                                                | * We can't control upstream software                |
+-----------------+------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+

What do we anticipate we'll have to deal with?

Typical user

No Linux experience at all

• Need to hold hand to start with
• No terminal ("hacker window") *at all*
  • Make GUIs for common tasks requiring terminal
  • Keep them from needing/wanting to execute arbitrary code from the internet
  • Training wheels on terminal (warnings on potentially dangerous commands)
    • Documentation for how to remove this once they feel they have enough experience
• All courses "just there"

Little/some Linux experience

• Some terminal... infrequently
• Tell them what's happening (when we're doing things for them), but don't overload them out of the box

Typical use cases

• Browsing the web (inc. Netflix, webmail)
• Classwork (inc. IDEs, try, etc.)
• Chat
• Word processing
• SSH (Banjo, etc.)