Ways of Plasma Questions

[Michael Rudolph]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Celeste Lyn Paul <celeste at kde.org> wrote:

Hello everyone,

it looks as though my fear was ungrounded and this thread in fact
leaves enough room to attend to all questions in line.

Most of your questions and concerns ought to be addressed in the next
part of the document, but I have to think up the answers and write
them down anyway, so I'll just start here.

> * Why did Mario create those categories (University, Hobbies, Private)?  Did
> she have too much information to deal with it all at once?  Or is she just a
> maximizer-organizer who likes to compartmentalize her life?

Well, as I said, the mind map is a depiction of the digital aspects of
a users life. You can see it as a nicer visualization of the user's
"$HOME/Documents" folder or as a nicer visualization of the user's
organizer or task list. -- Actually it's all of that. At once. Because
to the user it's only one thing, too: a task of his or her.

So why did Maria create those categories? I'm really having trouble
understanding the question. It seems like asking, why did you send
three emails today?, instead of just writing one compound message and
sending that to all three recipients.

For the same reason that people have more than one folder in their
home directories.

> * Why did Carlos create a document workspace?  Is this something he has been
> working on recently or over a long period of time?  Does he create work
> spaces for all of his activities or only some of them?  How many activities
> does he normally have going on and which ones make the cut to
> become "activities" on his desktop?

The same holds for this question: he created the workspace (activity),
because it was a task of his (writing the document, not creating the
workspace ;-). Is the temporal aspect important for the scenario? So
far I haven't really thought about it, but as far as I understand it,
it's irrelevant whether it's a long term project or just a one-off
thing for him.

Regarding the number of activities and whether he creates them for all
his tasks... I'd say: yes. But probably this won't work. I assume,
with such a system there will also be rather general activities,
because it just makes no sense for the user to categorise every
movement on his computer in such a mind mapped way, for a long time to
come. But even those generalised activities would probably be more
specific than today's desktop workspaces. But all the things that get
a separate folder in "$HOME/Documents" or an entry in our task lists
today, will also get a separate node in our mind maps.

> From what I gather, Plasma is trying to be a dashboard or portal for
> activities; activities being any combination of tasks involving one or more
> applications or documents over a period of time.  Instead of the user having
> to manage documents and applications separately and time and space, all the
> tools can be put in the same bucket, tray, container, whatever, which can be
> labeled, put to the side, and called on when the user wants to play with the
> stuff in that bucket.

There was another email in the "Scenario/storytelling" thread, where I
tried to explain that.

Yes. A mind map node is not just a "$HOME/Documents" folder and task
list entry, it's also a session, a view profile or as you called it: a
bucket.

> So basically, it a glorified shortcut manager with lots of cool and useful
> tools and looks pretty?  In the end, I think (I'm sure I will be corrected) I
> understand the vision of Plasma (what Plasma is trying to do), but I still
> don't understand the user's role in it.

What exactly are you asking? Surely not: well, the user's role is to use it.

> Some user information useful to me as a designer which is currently missing
> from the Plasma documentation:
>
> * What types of users are going to be using Plasma.  All of them.  If I change
> something for one user group, I need to know how it effects all the other
> user groups.
>
> * What types of users are going to be taking advantage of non-defaults, so I
> know which user groups I can ignore when designing certain classes of
> functionality
>
> * What are the kinds of things you can do with Plasma, and which user types
> will be likely to do them (related to the previous question).  Obviously not
> everyone is going to do everything.
>
> * What are the parts of the Plasma desktop, their interactions, and their
> roles within a user's activities?  Are differnt users going to use the same
> parts of the desktop in different ways?
>
> * What are some user scenarios and cases of some real-life activities.
>
> These are the types of questions I am asking myself as I take a critical look
> at a UI or am trying to change or design a new one.  Are there answers for
> these questions?
>
> As a side discussion, has anyone used, read, or generally found the
> results from user research interviews I did back in April useful?  Once the
> raw results came out, no one seemed to do anything with it further and so I
> stopped working on it.  It would be helpful to know what went wrong because I
> often do this type of activity with clients and they get a lot out of it.
> What was different for Plasma?  Did you not like the results?

I have read the interviews and commented on them when you posted them
in April. That's why I won't do it again here. But you are definitely
right, that we should discuss these matters some more, perhaps in
light of the two or probably other new scenarios and use cases.

Thanks again for your questions. I'm looking forward to new ones.

michael