5 Fun things in Fedora 12 (Video)

I recently got a Kodak zi8 video recorder. It works great in Fedora 12 so I was inspired to create a 15-minute video highlighting five fun things in Fedora 12.

Here’s what those things are – but be sure to watch the video for more information :

#1 Cheese

#2 Mana World

#3 Miro

#4 Tablet Support

#5 Agave

These aren’t necessarily the best or top or even most fun five things in Fedora, just five things I thought were fun and would like to demonstrate. So watch the video (A transcript is available as well) and enjoy.

Part 1:

Direct YouTube Link

Part 2:

Direct YouTube Link

You can try out all the things I demonstrated in Fedora 12 yourself. Download Fedora 12 today – get.fedoraproject.org.

(P.S. This video was edited in Fedora 12 using PiTiVi )

Fedora Interaction Design Hackfest Summary

So we had a very productive interaction design hackfest today in #fedora-design:

• We interviewed folks from three of the defined stakeholders groups – Fedora Infrastructure, Fedora Spins, and Fedora Help Forums (myself and Ryan Lerch conducted these! Thanks to Toshio, Smooge, sdziallas, and nirik for letting us interview you!)
• We have two written summaries for one of the stakeholder interviews.
• We have scheduled plans for four other interviews (María is going to interview the marketing team, and James Mulroy is going to interview me for the Design team, Mel is going to take care of the Desktop and QA interviews.)

The meeting logs are available if you’d like to check out what went on. We have 13 stakeholder interviews we need to do and only 6 are being worked on, so if you’d like to choose from the 7 left please do! Comment here to find out about how to get started

Mel and I were thinking it might be cool to do another hackfest on this stuff on the FUDBus next Friday. There will be quite a few stakeholders riding, and they will not be able to run from our questions while they are on the bus >:)

(Update: Added one more interview since nirik was so kind as to be interviewed before dinner )
(Update 2: Added summary of interview with nirik)

I know. I *know*.

I couldn’t help it. I’m a girl. I gotta work on the hair though…

Done in Gimp 2.7.0 with a Wacom tablet on Fedora 12.

Want to learn design skills? Want to help Fedora? Fedora Interaction Design Hackfest, Tuesday 24 Nov

Hopefully my post title has captured your attention. I would like to let you know about a project starting up right now that is a great opportunity for you to:

1. Learn about how interaction design is done.
2. Pick up some interaction design and user research skills.
3. Get involved in an open design project.
4. Help make Fedora better!

So the Fedora Board has started an initiative to create Fedora user profiles and personas to help inform decisions about Fedora policy and design in the future.

Okay Mo, so first of all, what is a persona?

From Wikipedia:

Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. Personas are most often used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), have been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.

A lot of discussion about personas is available on Cooper’s blog and is a good read for getting up to speed on what they are and how they work.

Okay, uh, so how are personas going to help us make Fedora policy and design decisions?

Well, for example, you may recall the great panda panda-monium from early www.fedoraproject.org redesign mockups, in which about half of folks giving feedback loved the panda (“Please kill to keep that damn Panda, mairin. The thing is too cute and seems to look like a great little mascot.”), and the other half felt the panda was an insult to Fedora users (“In general i like the layouts…. for 6 year old kids. If this is the best you can come up with you might as well base it on this: http://ostiaunlobby.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/teletubbies-group2.jpg”)

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion of the pandas. Those opinons may or may not have any bearing on how our target users might receive them, though. If we have a set of Fedora personas defined, we can talk about how each of the personas, designed to be representative of our target audience would feel about pandas. Discussing whether or not the Fedora panda is a good choice for our *target audience* or not will help us make decisions based on the target audience we’ve agreed upon for Fedora rather than base it on knee-jerk / personal / anecdotal reactions that merely represent the personal opinons of the folks who happened to be around at the time to give their feedback.

There’s more discussion of potential benefits of personas to Fedora in a post I made yesterday to the ‘User Profiles’ thread on fedora-advisory-board list, so please check it out for more info and please feel free to dive into the discussion with any questions / commentary / feedback you have.

Well Mo, this sounds good. But where do we get personas from?

We’ll build them. Well, I think there’s a lot of different methods to going about constructing personas, but to be good they need to be backed by user research data. User research data can take many forms.

The approach I’d like to propose for Fedora persona development is based on the user research process advocated for in Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky. A high-level / action-oriented summary of the approach is as follows:

1. Define the product and product goals. Done.
2. Decide on an audience to target with the product that will help meet the product goals. Done.
3. Conduct interviews of product stakeholders in order to determine high-level research questions to consider exploring with members of the target audience. Proposal for doing this.
4. Draw up a list of specific research questions to answer to start conducting user research on the intended target audience. These are specific rather than high-level questions. For example:
   • “Does the target audience care about software freedom or not?” could be a Fedora Board stakeholder high-level research question.
   • Specific questions that could be explored during research, “Does that target audience know what free software is?” “Does the target audience already use free software? If so, which software?”
5. Prioritize the specific research questions, pick a cut-off point for how many to explore, and determine research methods for each.
6. Draw up a research schedule and assign specific research tasks to volunteers.
7. Do the research! And check in with volunteers to make sure they’ve not run into any issues and help them resolve them.
8. Hold a data analysis session. Cluster the data from the research into 3-8 groupings from which to build the personas on.
9. Brainstorm and document the personas!

So…. How can I help?

SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!!! I am blocking out Tuesday, November 24th to be an interaction design hackfest. I want to run it from 3 pm – 6 pm EDT (8 PM – 11 PM UTC) on #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net. I’d like us to start working on work item #3, conducting interviews of product stakeholders, in order to get moving on the persona-building process. Depending on how far we get we may be able to dip into #4 and #5.

What concrete actions will helping involve?

• Interviewing Fedora stakeholders via email or IRC in order to answer the stakeholder interview questions.
• Documenting the Fedora stakeholder interviews by organizing the interview results on a Fedora wiki page.
• Reviewing the interview answers and brainstorming potential research questions.
• Per research question, brainstorming ways we can gather data to help answer the question. (Could we answer that question by running a questionnaire on Planet Fedora? Could we answer it by running some usability tests at FUDcon Toronto next month? Could we answer it by looking at fedoraproject.org website logs?)

You do not have to be an artist to help with design! So show up next Tuesday and find out how you can help.

• Date: Tuesday 24 November 2009
• Time: 3-6 PM EDT; 8-11 PM UTC
• Place: #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net
• Host: mizmo (me!)
• Agenda: Fedora User Research Plan

p.s. for the panda-haters, how about this mascot:

New Fedora Spins site with Fedora 12

With the release of Fedora 12 we’ve given the spins.fedoraproject.org a bit of a facelift. (What did it look like before? Pre-facelift spins.fedoraproject.org.)

I wanted to tell the tale of this redesign to show how we did it, together as a community, and also to give kudos to the many folks who pitched in and made it happen.

• Paul kicked off a discussion on fedora-advisory-board list back in July. The goal was to initiate a close examination and improvement of the Fedora download experience. The Fedora Board asked myself and Ricky Zhou to figure out what we could do the help the website towards this goal.
• Ricky and I met with the Board and we kicked off the redesign process at the end of July. I asked the Board to specify requirements for the redesign, mentioning who the target audience for the redesigned pages was, and who the target audience was not.
• Mel created a wiki project page to serve as a central place to store the documents and mockups related to the redesign project.
• The Board came up with the requirements and target audience information as requested and Paul wrote them up on the wiki.
• Paul was in Boston for a few days, and we sat down with a whiteboard and later Inkscape and a projector and came up with some initial mockups for a cleaner www.fedoraproject.org experience that I posted to Planet Fedora on August 8. We received a lot of great feedback on these mockups (thank you!) and took a lot of the feedback into account, iterating the designs.
• An initial spins mockup idea was posted to Planet Fedora on August 11. Again, we got tons of great feedback that was rolled back into the mockups.
• During the fedora-advisory-board list discussion on the mockups, we ran a survey on how folks get Fedora to help inform the design work. 78 people took the time to fill out the survey! It helped us understand why, how, and when folks download Fedora, and which Fedoras they prefer to download which was good data for the redesign.
• Rex shared his concerns about the www.fpo mockups and their implications for the KDE Desktop spin. This resulted in various changes in the initial design – 16 iterations to the get.fedoraproject.org page design, resulting in a nice, clean, single download-button page design that still offered plenty of opportunity to drive traffic to spins.fedoraproject.org. As a result of this discussion, too, the Board agreed that the spins.fedoraproject.org redesign needed to be prioritized higher than the get.fedoraproject.org design. Since the new get.fedoraproject.org design was de-emphasizing spins, those spins would need a nicely-designed home first so the links to them weren’t lost.
• By September 18 I had an initial cut of what the spins site would look like. I got some great feedback on those as well, and felt like we had a pretty solid idea of what spins.fedoraproject.org was going to look like.
• With the spins.fedoraproject.org design’s path made more clear, I went back to the get.fedoraproject.org to make sure it was meeting the Board’s requirements and also accounting for the KDE SIG’s concerns. On October 5 another iteration of the get.fedoraproject.org mockups was posted to Planet Fedora. These introduced a new tabbed “More Options” area that provided links out to the spins.fedoraproject.org site.
• Shortly after on October 8, we hit up the Spins SIG to help us get content put together for each of the spin details pages on the new spins.fedoraproject.org site. (several reminders were posted to Planet Fedora as well. ) The Spins SIG is a great group of people to work with. They quickly put together wiki pages for their spins content which we used to populate the text and screenshots in each spin’s page. Jaroslav Reznik stepped up and managed this for the KDE spin.
• Sijis Aviles began completely rocking out the implementation of the spins site. I have to say, Sjis is a rockstar, TAKE NOTE. He put together cleanly templated pages that were true to the mockups, made sure everything was set up for localization, and made sure the various features (rotating banners and features) worked and got some assistance (thanks Seth!) to put together the top 5 downloaded spins widget and made sure it happened. Without him, this redesign would not have happened.
• On October 28 my initial designs for the Spins banners were posted to Planet Fedora and shared with the Spins maintainers. Changes were made and posted on Nov 1 based on community feedback.
• Next major kudos goes to the Fedora Design team. They totally rocked out. I posted a desperate plea to the design team mailing list for help in putting together screenshots for the many games in the Games spin. On short notice, we got 99 screenshots for the Games Spin, with more on the way. Kudos to Charlie Brej, Patrick Connelly, Hisham Abdel-Magid, Hector Gomez, and Ryan Lerch who all pitched in!
• We missed the string freeze for get.fedoraproject.org and that redesign ended up getting pushed back to post-F12, since the complication of managing two different themes/styles on the websites was too much in the time we had. But look for those changes coming soon.
• The site went live this week – thanks to Ricky for helping us push the site out on F12 release day!

I’m sure I’m forgetting some items and deserved kudos (let me know and I’ll update this post) but I have to leave for my bus now so that’s all for now. I hope this gives you some insight into a community design & implementation process.

And check out spins.fedoraproject.org and let us know what you think! We’re of course always open to improvements – this is an open design process. Also note there is more work to be done – let me know if you’ve any interest in helping out

IT’S HERE!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gimp 2.7.0 x86_64 packages for Fedora 12

The lure of layer groups drove me to build F12 RPMs for Gimp 2.7.0 last night. However, I was not to get that new sparkly pink pony for my stable, as layer groups are not in 2.7.0. That being said, there’s still some interesting tweaks (one I noticed was brush filtering, another was a very nice cleanup of the save dialogs) so you may want to give these a shot to check up on Gimp’s progress.

Use ‘em at your own risk of course. I am no expert packager and in my desperate fervor for acquiring pink sparkle ponies, I resorted to some dirty tricks to make these build

http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/packages/f12/gimp-2.7.0/

THREE MORE DAYS!

Fedora 12 One-Page Release Notes PDF

We’ve [1] been working on a set of one-page release notes for Fedora 12, and now that those are set I took some time today to put them into a single PDF file. However, there are 3 pages…! So, for your event, you might like to print out two sets of release notes: Page 1 + Page 2 for desktop users, and Page 1 + Page 3 for system administrators and developers. Then allow folks to pick up either or both depending on their interest. Or, you can simply print out all three as one packet. Whatever you like.

[1] According to Fedora’s wiki history, the following people contributed to the page: Paul Frields, Máirín Duffy, Mel Chua, Nicu Buculei, Steven Moix, Sakis Asamaras, Charley Wang. In addition to those folks, David Aquilina provided a photo, and Caius Chance volunteered to model for another photo. Eric Sparks and the Fedora Documentation team came up with the concept. Thanks everyone!

ZOMG I CAN’T STAND IT FOUR MORE DAYS!

Friday fun with tablets!

Fedora 12 rocks on tablets, so Nicu, Kushal, and María decided to start a Friday fun tablet meme – draw a kindergarten style house.

Of course I couldn’t resist, so here is my house!

FOUR MORE DAYS!

Getting Ready for F12: Media Sleeves and Labels

Fedora 12 is not out yet, no. However, thanks in a big part to Luya being on the ball and getting started on the media artwork, and with his help, we have put together a full set of Fedora 12 media artwork. So now you can have a head start at getting your media all prepared and ready to burn next Tuesday!

All the media artwork has been created for the following Fedoras:

• Fedora Desktop Live Media, 32-bit and 64-bit
• Fedora KDE Live Media, 32-bit and 64-bit
• Fedora Install DVD, 32-bit and 64-bit

We’ve got sleeves:

We’ve got labels:

I also put together a set of LightScribe labels. We could actually really use your help with these – I don’t have a LightScribe burner so I don’t have a way to test the design. If you’re planning to LightScribe burn F12 anyway and have the equipment to do so, would you mind giving one of the designs a try and letting us know if the label design works okay?

We also have made all of the templates used to create these designs available, so if you want to make a custom label (maybe you’ve a favorite spin you’d like to burn?) you’re free to do so. Wait a minute, you don’t own expensive Adobe software? Gee, you are silly – you don’t need that stuff! All these designs were made in Fedora! Check it out:

• The base background design used in the sleeves and in the LightScribe designs was made in Gimp.
• The layout of the sleeves and labels was made in Scribus, with a little bit of SVG help from Inkscape.
• The LightScribe layout was made in Inkscape.

FIVE MORE DAYS!!!