Re: Who is "the user"?

Timothy Hahn wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> As I have been reading a number of the posts on this list, I am now 
> wondering if we have established "who" the user is that we are 
> targeting.  Or whether we have to consider different types of users 
> (with different assumed skill or interest levels).
> 
> Continuing the automobile dashboard analogy - providing detailed error 
> codes found by the CPU in the car would not be useful to the driver (as 
> user).  However, they are quite useful to the technician (as user).

I'm not so sure that analogy is good here. In the case of a browser,
a user has the chance to drill down for more detail, or to hide levels
of detail. When driving, that'd be unsafe.

The point is that we have the opportunity here to consider offering
different views on the security context, whereas that's not an option
on a dashboard. (I'm not defending the current approach with dialog
boxes offering info on revocation status choices etc.)

One could of course argue that offering different views is a bad
idea, but sticking too closely to this analogy assumes that that
argument has happened already, which it hasn't.

> Do we have a categorization or set of known "users" that we are targeting?

That'd be useful input all right, esp. if based on some kind of
empirical evidence rather than being some classification we cook
up ourselves. Might be too much to ask though.

S.

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 14:07:56 UTC