Bazaar Personas

Front page

Who comes to the front page of the Bazaar Web site? We need to know this to get the BazaarHomePageRedesign right. Please edit this document as you see fit.

Let's pretend that Bazaar is a product you can buy. That allows us to use fun and vomit inducing terms like "sales conversion" and "unique selling proposition." The front page of the Bazaar site must pitch solutions to potential customers in a way that pulls them in past the front page where the real meat of the site happens. To know the right way to funnel people in, we need to know "who" we're dealing with. This document outlines different types of people who are landing on the front page that are potential customers. We'll use these personas to figure out how to funnel each type of person to an appropriate area of the site where they will ultimately choose to use Bazaar because it rocks.

Aside: I am going to start with the very big assumption that most people looking to solve a specific problem are doing a search and have landed "inside" the Web site, not on the front page.

Kris

• Occupation: IT Manager
• Chris is an IT Manager at a medium sized firm. He has 20 programmers in his department and is getting fed up with using his current version control system. Or rather, his programmers are fed up with it and that means they're spending more time complaining than working. A few programmers have suggested various version control systems and he's checking out the various Web sites. Although he understands all the technical terminology, he's never used a DVCS and wants to know how it will affect the productivity of his team. It's very important to Chris that the software not get in the way. He needs to rely on the product and be able to deal with a professional who understands the system if his team gets hung up on a problem. In addition to his programmers, Chris has a few graphic designers that contribute to his projects on occasion. He's curious to know what the options are for each of Windows, OSX and Linux based-distros, but this is not necessarily a deal breaker for him.
• Needs to find: commercial support options, workflow models, integration with existing tools

Randy

• Occupation: Software Developer
• Randy is completely sick and tired of using CVS. He really wants his team to switch, but there is resistance to learning a new set of tools. Randy wants to switch to a DVCS, but needs to prove to his boss and his team that Bazaar is the right option. His team uses Windows and OSX and are familiar with the command line, but tend to use GUI tools/IDEs for most of their work. Ideally Randy will be able to "show" his team how awesome Bazaar is by pointing at various pages in the Web site. He's sold on Bazaar from hanging out in IRC and on the mailing list, but now he needs to convince everyone else on his team.
• Needs to find: screenshots of GUI clients, available plugins for IDEs, description of DVCS with workflow examples, intro tutorials that will show his team how easy it is to use Bazaar.

Dawn

• Occupation: Developer and Freelance Hacker
• Dawn is a freelance hacker. In her day job she works for The Man on large scale banking software. It pays the bills, but she thinks it sucks. She'd rather be working on open source software projects. She's got a couple of projects she contributes to, all of which use a different VCS. She knows the basic commands for all of them, but gets most of her information from tutorials she finds via Google searches. For the most part she doesn't care where she gets her HOWTOs, as long as they work. A few months ago she started helping out with bugs on Launchpad and has been using Bazaar because of it. She's been using Unfuddle (with subversion) for a couple of her freelance contracts, but is thinking about switching over to Bazaar and contributing back to the project.
• Needs to find: product licensing, sense of the developer community, advanced user and developer documentation

With these people in mind, let's take a look at the front page wireframe again:

Above the fold

Solutions/Features - Solution-oriented, marketing speak

• Kris needs to see how Bazaar can solve the problems his team is currently having with his existing DVCS. Out of all of the regions on the site, this is the most "marketing friendly."
• Randy skims over this area initially looking for screenshots of GUI clients he can show his team mates. He comes back to it when he needs "stories" to show how DVCS works in real projects.
• Dawn doesn't really notice or care about this region.

Help - The Reassurance section

• Kris needs to see that commercial support options are available, but that they aren't the only option. He likes the fact that there is a lot of documentation (he doesn't have time to read it, but it sure looks complete).
• Randy notices there's a help section, but also knows that he'll be the one giving most of the support if he convinces people to switch. He's glad the documentation looks complete, but is more concerned about seeing how things work rather than reading about how they work.
• Dawn read some documentation once, but thought it kinda sucked. She skims this area but knows Google will help her if she really needs it.

Install - The obvious section

• Kris and Randy see they can deploy this system on anything that supports Python. Cool.
• Dawn uses the Bazaar package for her distro, she doesn't really care about "installation" but she does care about hosting and installing Bazaar on her VPS if an alternative to Unfuddle doesn't exist.

Extend - The will it integrate into my life section

• Kris and Randy both read this part carefully to see what integration options are available for the tools their team is familiar with. They know that a lot of "core" programs need to be extended by plugins. They want to know what the support is like for these plugins, if they are kept up to date with the current release of Bazaar and if their IDE is in the list of supported apps.
• Dawn wants to hack on stuff. She thinks it's really cool there are so many plugins and starts thinking about what kind of stuff she might build on top of Bazaar.

On the fold:

About Bazaar

• Randy and Dawn scan logos to see which projects they recognize. They skim over the links in the text to see if there are any extra words that look interesting enough to follow. They already know about DVCS though and are sort of blind to walls of text.
• Kris reads through the "About" text to orient himself in what DVCS is all about. He uses the links to jump to relevant parts of the site without having to pick them out the nav list which he can now see in the footer.

Release notes and features

• Dawn and Randy scan the list to see what the project thinks is a big deal. Dawn clicks on one of the links about support for a specific feature that she heard someone complain about on one of her project mailing lists. She thinks it might be able to solve the needs of the project and is wondering if she should tell the project to switch to Bazaar.
• Kris looks at the list and is relieved to see the development of the project is active. Everything in the list is newer than six months.

Standard footer:

This area should be redundant against the top part of the page as it is persistent throughout the site. Based on the feedback to date it may make sense to remove Support and replace it with "About." About could include links to: Product overview, commercial support options, licensing, hosting.