[wdmmg-discuss] WDMMG personas and audience engagement

[Rufus Pollock]

On 14 May 2010 14:14, steve cummaford <cummaford at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I've uploaded a document defining the WDMMG audience, and some thoughts on
> how we can engage them in the new design solution. We can build on these
> initial thoughts as we progress through the design process, and use them to
> reason about how we can encourage participation and repeat visits to the
> site. If you have comments, please share them.
>
> https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0BxrbigXPWr7PYTVhZjU3ZWEtNTU5NS00OTUxLThjMTMtMzE4Njk2MjU2MjU5&hl=en_GB

@Steve: first off, a belated thanks for this -- it's really good.

The main groups identified in your doc were:

  * General population
  * Bloggers / activists
  * New voters
  * School children
  * Teachers
  * Political party workers

This together with the analysis of what people wanted was great but I
think there are some changes we should make. Specifically, I think we
should:

  * Drop the school children and teachers as they are hard to reach
and probably not our number one priority (teachers v. busy etc)
  * Drop the new voter (post-election is this as relevant and this is
a rather nebulous group)
  * Break down the general population

I therefore, propose a new set of the main groups of people interested
in WDMMG would (* indicates already on list):

  * Journalists
  * Bloggers (esp with a public info interest) and Activists (*)
  * Political party workers and staffers (*)
  * Civil servants
  * Data geeks (* - mentioned but stated that if we address others
probably address them)
  * Issue-based groups. (E.g. interested in Environment and energy, Immigration)
    * Way of breaking down "general public"
  * Users of news websites
    * Already online and interested in current affairs plus a good
division of types
    * e.g.  Guardian, Daily Mail, Times

I also think we should:

  * distill out main "wants" of each group - why come to the site?
why come back? - into a few bullet points
    * the summaries we already have are excellent so all we need is to
do a bit of extraction
  * prioritisation of users based on size, importance to overall aims
of the project
    * all users are important but it makes sense to have some
priority, esp. re planning features

Lastly, two very minor items: a) the personas seem a little old b)
could we use a title for this such as "Who Could Use WDMMG and Why?"
rather than the, rather dry,  "User personas and audience engagment"
:)

Regards,

Rufus