Albert

From BasKetUsabilityWiki

Based on the scientific researcher skeleton.

[edit] Personal details

Albert is a student of physics and 25 years old. He lives in a flat share with two other students in Marseille, France and goes to university several times a week. He attends lectures regularly, and from time to time has to prepare for a presentation or write a paper, most often together with other students. Two times a week, he works at a bar to finance his study.

He wouldn't call himself a computer expert, but has enough confidence in his computer literacy to learn to handle new applications quickly and easily without external help. He chose to use Linux after a fellow student showed him some state-of-the-art scientific applications which cost nothing and which became a great support for his study. He likes it when programs are fast and easy to learn, but if he has to learn a simple language to operate a physical simulations application, he would do it.

[edit] Study

Albert has to work at many different places at university, and at home, too, so he had decided to buy a laptop a couple of years ago. This way he's always got all his data with him. He uses his laptop in lectures to take notes he will use later when learning for tests.

When preparing for presentations or when writing a paper, Albert writes down ideas, collects material likes book references, quotes (including their sources), and sometimes text snippets he wants to include in the presentation or paper. Especially when Albert is doing research for a longer work, e.g. his thesis, he maintains a scientific journal in which he writes down anything that has to do with the topic, like ideas, accomplishments, diary-like entries and so on.

[edit] BasKet usage

For every "project" (like, for example, preparing a presentation or writing a paper), Albert creates a new basket and adds some sub-baskets with time. He creates

• an overview basket which contains general project infos or URLs (his "portal basket"),
• a basket for quick notes, in which he jots down ideas he has in the middle of other work,
• a to-do list with project-specific tasks (some with deadlines),
• outlines for texts which he copies into OpenOffice later to work them out,
• a literature references basket (sometimes just a link to an online library or amaz*n page), which he transfers to a bibliography tool (KBibTeX) later on, and
• a basket for quotes he thinks he could use, with references.

He often exchanges the outlines, quotes and other notes with students in the current study group, sometimes to single persons from the group, sometimes to all members. This is not a fixed group of people, but changes from class to class and from semester to semester. They all use different computers, so one time he sends a basket, and the other time he sends a Word document.

Often he enriches his notes with copies of graphical illustrations from the web. He has to take care to include source information with these, which he sometimes forgets. He also inserts diagrams or graphs he created and exported with other programs into his baskets. One thing he misses is the possibility to include mathematical formulas in his notes. When Albert is done collecting and structuring information, he sometimes would like to easily export a basket to an OpenOffice application, like Writer, Calc or Presenter. Now, he does this by using HTML export or Cut&Paste. He especially likes the free-layout baskets because they allow him to structure and reorder notes into groupings as he likes, but he misses a possibility to link notes to each other in multiple ways (not only grouping).