On Wed, Oct 11, 2006 at 11:02:21PM +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Joshua A. Andler wrote:
Who are the target users of Inkscape? Nailing that down would avoid confusion and help people focus on serving those users and make decision making easier when tradeoffs must be made.
I think that the target can be summed up quite easily... anyone and everyone.
Yes sure, but that is quite different from what I'm talking about. There are subgroups within "everyone".
As you yourself listed there are people who can be grouped by the tasks they are trying to achieve. For example it might eventually make sense to gather a set of extension and a custom version of inkscape for technical drawing and crimes scenes (kind of like visio) which would highlight some functionality and demphasise others. It might make sense to have a version tailored to comic books, or other versions tailored to different tasks etc. It is a fairly standard idea in usability and design to try and pin down who your users are as it helps you prioritise what to work on first even if you would like to work on everything straight away.
I don't know; I can certainly see how this is a valuable approach for a commercial product, where you have developers that don't really understand what the product needs to do, and need to set up strawmen and use cases in order to understand what to code.
However, particularly in Inkscape, defining a "target user" may not even be necessary; Open Source developers tend to be heavy users of the software and thus have an inherent knowledge of what priorities and usability issues need worked on.
In fact, despite having a roadmap, each developer actually has his own set of priorities and motivations. In fact, the roadmap really ought to be thought of more as a 'forecast'. Developers should be free to work on what they each feel are the most important priorities; for tasks that involve multiple people, the roadmap is useful as a way of documenting their present concensus on what should be worked on when, but shouldn't be taken as written in stone or anything.
Regarding target users, Josh is right - Inkscape does not have a single target user, but more of a range, and a highly organic range at that. As users make contributions that open the tool to new classes of users, our target userbase makeup will shift. (And since the shift will be driven by the desires of the contributors, we again see a strong correlation with the desires of contributors, and thus again reach the observation that Inkscape's target audience can be defined by its contributors.)
Indeed, you could even argue that Inkscape's target audience are people that find Inkscape of only borderline usefulness to them; these people are the ones most likely to get irritated enough to contribute, and thereby open Inkscape up to that whole market. If you follow this particular line of reasoning, you actually arrive at a conclusion that many of the links Bulia added (spec, faq, release notes, etc.) are extremely important, since those are the exact thing these users will need in order to make the contributions necessary to open Inkscape to those audiences.
I think another reason I dislike the idea of defining "target users" is that it facilitates the mentality that users and developers are two separate groups, and that users exist to define requirements for the developers to implement. That is the WRONG MODEL for us; it's the commercial software product model. In the open source model, users are empowered - indeed, customers/users/consumers have *HUGE* power in this model, moreso than they've ever had for thousands of years; yet taking advantage of this requires that they *GET INVOLVED* - users realize their power through contributing, and those who do not participate won't be empowered. Thus for the user's own sake we need to take every advantage of getting them to stop thinking in terms of user vs. developer, and more thinking in terms of contributor vs. non-contributor, and make them realize that in this model it is the contributors who are going to be the big winners.
Today I just sat through a whole series of talks at OSDL's member company conference. A bunch of end user companies/governments spoke about their FOSS adoption and the question came up if they ever contributed back. EVERY ONE of them not only said they contributed back, but that they viewed the ability to contribute back as one of the big advantages to using FOSS.
Bryce