Open source Organizer pondered
Top life management software Organizer could be open sourced by author Chris Morison in a bid to kick-start its future development. Chris admitted this week he has been unable to work on the popular shareware program since March 2003 as he has left university, found a real job, stopped using RISC OS and married some lucky woman.
Releasing the blue prints to Organizer will allow third party prgrammers to dive into the code, fix bugs and add new features.
Chris also said his software is "very stable" and he has added all the features he ever hoped to come up with - and now hopes to find people to continue working on the program. If demand for a new version of Organizer is too low or if there are no programmers willing to pick up the baton, Chris will release, presumably, a final version as freeware. If there is enough demand and coders available, he said today he was willing to go down the open source route.
Calling for comments from users and developers, Chris said: "I'm disinclined just to hand over the source code to one individual and leave it in their hands, no matter how talented, committed or helpful to me they've been in the past.
"I would, however, be happy to release the source under some form of open source licence. Care would have to be taken to protect the brand and ensure that there aren't forks with the same name but incompatible file formats - but we can discuss that if we decide it's worthwhile."
Chris added: "I haven't touched the code since March 2003. The reason for this is that since I left University in 2002 I've started full-time employment and got married, which means that I have very little time these days to devote to programming as a hobby."
Organizer is a desktop personal organiser featuring a calendar, diary, anniversary address book, and a simple, user friendly graphical interface. The software's users were this afternoon quick to ask for iCal file import support, mobile phone and PDA synchronisation, as well as other feature suggestions.
Developer Theo Markettos said: "A lot of the developments that have happened, such as people taking over projects or producing upgrades to support 32 bit and new OSes, took place because the source was 'out there' and it was easy for someone to fiddle with, not necessarily with any obvious maintainer.
"Personally for any project I'd be much more likely to 'have a go' to make casual Sunday-afternoon changes if the source was easily downloadable, rather than had to negotiate access beforehand. If there was a maintainer I'd submit these to them."
Giving Personality to Your Personas
Ever since reading Call to Action I've been in love with the whole idea of personas. We've been doing a lot of reading on the topic lately and learning how to create strong personas for each website we work with.
One of the things we've been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a persona and a personality. I was finally able to boil each down into a few words that made it easy for us to see the difference:
Persona = motivation (what the visitor needs, why they are on your site)
Personality = temperament (how they navigate, what they need to see or read to find what they want)
This is just my own interpretation and subject to modification, but for now it does its part in providing easy clarification between the two.
Personas
We're still trying to understand the process of fleshing out personas. What gets included, what gets left out, etc. But what we do understand is that a persona must be developed to meet any particular need that certain users might have before coming to your website. To do this you need to do your research and know your target audience. For some sites this can mean developing a lot of personas to fill a lot of needs, and for others it means a few personas for only a few needs. But regardless of how many user "needs" you need to fulfill your best bet is to boil them all down into no more than a handful of personas.
Here are a few common personas that we've developed:
The "how-to" Persona
This person is an information seeker. They are not necessarily looking to buy a product or service, but want to do it themselves. They may be willing to pay for the information they want.
Example: Person goes to a baby products site looking how to properly install a car seat. They may or may not be looking to buy a car seat, but if they find the information they want they could return frequently and become a customer in the future.
The "I care" Persona
These people are usually thoughtful about what it is they are looking for. They are passionate about the topic and want to know more about how your product or service is going to meet their needs.
Example: Person goes to a baby products site looking for a car seat that is safe and reliable. They've been reading about the importance of car seats, how to install them properly and want to make sure that the seat they buy for their child will be top quality.
The "Just get it to me" Persona
These people don't really know what they want. They have a need but are unsure on how best to fill that need. They just want a product or service that gives them the desire result.
Example: Person needs a car seat. To them, all car seats are the same and don't understand why one is more expensive than the other. They are just looking to get a seat and get it installed so they usually pick the least expensive one. They can be convinced to upgrade, given the right information.
These are just a few that have been rattling around in my brain for a bit and are by no means "perfect" representations of personas. Just part of our ever-evolving persona development guidelines. Take them with a grain of salt.