OpenStack personas - an early draft proposal for personas to target (or not) & refine for the OpenStack project. Personas document: http://bit.ly/OpenStackPersonas

1. Personas: 6 months on
Dave Neary – dneary@redhat.com
Open Source and Standards
@nearyd on Twitter (for live tweets)
8 November 2013

2. Quick recap

3. Persona{e,s}

4. The Origin of Personas

5. Persona basics
●
A persona should have enough detail to make the
person “feel” real
–
–
Photo
–
Age
–
Job
–
●
Name
Family situation
Distilled characteristics of market segment (Cooper
calls these “archetypes”)

6. Personas focus debate and discussion
Credit: CC BY
Nina Matthews Photography@flickr

7. Creating a persona
Step 1:
Interviews
Credits: CC BY-NC-SA
toastkid@flickr

8. Creating a persona
Step 2:
Cluster and
consolidate
profiles into
archetypes

9. Creating a persona
Step 3:
Simplify
and distill
Credits: CC BY-SA-NC
fedoreando.wordpress.com

10. What use are they?

11. Marketing and promotion

12. Marketing and promotion
●
What conferences does our audience go to?
●
What publications do they read?
●
What key messages will resonate?

13. Documentation

14. Documentation
●
What can I assume about the audience?
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What kinds of questions do they have?
●
How do they search for and find docs?

15. User experience

16. User experience design
●
What are the main tasks?
●
What is the mental model audience has?
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Separating different workflows (admin vs user vs
deployer)

17. Development

18. Development
●
What are the highest priority features?
●
Options vs sensible defaults?
●
Concentrating efforts on areas of biggest benefit

19. Target audience
CC BY-SA,
vizzzual.com @ flickr

20. OpenStack User Committee
An OpenStack User may have different roles:
● A consumer [...]
● An operator [...]
● An ecosystem partner [...]
● A distribution provider or appliance vendor [...]
An OpenStack User may have different types of organizational
affiliation: [...]
An OpenStack User may come from different market segments:
[...]
An OpenStack User may come from different geographic regions:
[...]
Source: http://bit.ly/1102DAP

21. Contributing sources
●
●
Aeolus Conductor personas:
https://aeolusproject.org/redmine/projects/aeolus/wiki
/Personas
NTT Com Security “Cloud Personas”:
http://www.integralis.com/en/uploads/files/Cloud
%20Personas%20whitepaper%20-%20FINAL.pdf
●
IBM Cloud user roles: ACM CHIMIT ’11
●
EMC UX blog: http://uxblog.emc.com/2013/05/
●
Bruce Reeler & Ju Lim from Red Hat
●
RDO Forum users

22. OpenStack Personas
http://bit.ly/OpenStackPersonas

23. Anna the Enterprise Admin
●
●
Big company – 3 datacenters worldwide
Mostly VMware, HyperV, KVM on host, mostly
Windows & Linux guests
●
Considering IaaS for self-service
●
Needs reassurance, monitoring, marketplace
●
Anna deploys what the CIO/Director of IT decides

24. Simon the SMB Admin
●
●
●
Medium sized company with developers – Simon
dabbles and adopts technology he thinks will make
his life easier
Already using AWS – wants private IaaS for devel &
QA self-service
Needs easy way to apply security updates, good
monitoring for nodes, quotas & guests

25. Dan the Deployer
●
●
●
●
Services company
Dan looks at a lot of technology, but spends his time
where the money is – project-based work
Dan's an installer & architect – wants an easy way to
spec out & design a cloud, deploy it, and get out
Involved during installation, major version upgrades,
but not admin

26. Erin the DevOps web dev & deployer
●
Erin has been using AWS for a while
●
Very familiar with CI/CD tools and workflows
●
●
Primarily developing apps for internal usage, helping
other web developers do their deployment
Focused on her apps, and doesn't care much what
the underlying infrastructure is

27. Diane the Developer
●
●
●
Diane develops applications which build on and
integrate with OpenStack – her company is a vendor
of cloud-related hardware
Cares about the upstream experience, and about the
quality, stability and documentation of the APIs
Diane's company cares about generating revenues
from sales of hardware for OpenStack deployments

28. Ursula the University IT Director
●
●
●
●
Ursula manages the university's 400 servers, spread
over 2 data centers, to manage the university IT
needs, grid computing, and student IT requests
Ursula prefers open source for cost and control
reasons
Has some pressure from staff and students to
provide more flexible IT management for projects,
teaching, on-demand scientific computing resources
Cares about monitoring, security updates

29. Brad the Beginner
●
●
●
●
Brad is a dabbler
Needs easy install and set-up – get main ideas
quickly, but brush over details
Wants “Getting started” tutorials up to and including
“something useful running”
Brad lacks the knowledge to dig in and debug issues
with installation and configuration

30. Victor the VI Admin
●
●
●
●
Victor knows all there is to know about vSphere. Has
mastered automation and control of his infrastructure
Maintains compute, storage & network resources for
a medium-sized company
IT needs are evolving, and he's considering IaaS to
respond to self-service requests from technical
colleagues
Pain points: Capacity planning, integrating Iaas in a
heterogeneous environment

31. Dennis the Director of IT
●
Dennis is nervous about new technology
●
Unsure about the cost and benefits of a private IaaS
●
●
Pressure to evolve due to tightening IT budgets,
demand for faster response time to IT ticket requests
for new services
Worried how he's going to control & manage things
when anyone can create a service

32. Alan the AWS Enthusiast
●
Works for a start-up that makes mobile applications
●
Been using AWS for years
●
●
●
Wants to concentrate on application, not on
managing the platform
“Automate all the things” – security updates, test,
staging, production deployment cycle
Cost & effort of moving to an alternative IaaS are key
concerns for him

33. Walter the Web Developer
●
●
●
Walter doesn't care about infrastructure or
deployment, he cares about web development
Happy developing Symfony/Bootstrap/HTML5 apps
on his Macbook, testing via VirtualBox
Needs guidance on how to build apps for the cloud
without having to learn the ins & outs of an IaaS

34. Help!
●
Key audiences not personified
–
–
Core developers
–
●
Press, analysts, pundits
Distributors/product managers
Personas need polish
–
Compare to reality

35. Help!
●
●
Integrate User Committee survey results & get user
feedback/interviews
Personas are useful when they're used
–
User interface design
–
Documentation
–
Marketing
–
Feature prioritization

36. Resources (added for SlideShare)
●
●
●
OpenStack personas on Google docs:
http://bit.ly/OpenStackPersonas
OpenStack user stories:
https://www.openstack.org/user-stories/
OpenStack user committee survey results:
http://bit.ly/OpenStackSurveyNov13

37. Thank you!
Questions?
Dave Neary
Open Source and Standards
Red Hat
dneary@redhat.com
@nearyd