Sophie

From BasKetUsabilityWiki

Based on the "business user" skeleton.

[edit] Personal details and computer literacy

Sophie is 36 and lives in Berlin, Germany, with her husband and her daughter. She is working as regional marketing consultant for the German branch office of Sun Powersystems, an international operating company that produces and sells solar energy equipment.

Her experience with computers is limited to using standard applications like web browser, email client, text processor and spreadsheet application. When her company switched to Linux and KDE, everyone had to attend a two-hour course and a helpdesk was founded. When something doesn't work, she doesn't hesitate to call the helpdesk, because she neither has the time nor desire to solve the problem herself. If the system administrator solved a problem she frequently had, she writes the solution into a basket she created for that, because it saves her time in the future.

She likes it if application are clean and simple, with only the functions she needs. The only times she changes application settings is when the sysadmin tells her that. She doesn't care about changing every detail of the desktop look at all. At home, Sophie and her husband have a PC running Windows which they use regularly for email and web surfing, and for writing a letter sometimes.

[edit] Professional life

Sun sells solar energy equipment worldwide. Products range from private standard solar panels to large-scale customer-specific solar plants. The company has about 200 employees, spread over several countries. Sophie works in the German office. Sophie's task at Sun is to contact potential customers, to stay in touch with current customers and assist the development of new products. When developing new products she cooperates with several people from different departments: ideas have to be shared, many plans are developed, feasibility or business analyses are sent and forth, until a new series can go into production and sales.

In larger projects, sometimes Sophie is assigned the task to form a team to develop a business strategy. She then has to plan meetings, assign work tasks and collect results.

[edit] BasKet use

Sun decided to introduce Linux for the employees on both server and desktop systems two years ago. Every desktop PC has the same setup, and the administration is done centrally by system administrators. For Sophie, this change was not a big deal because the few applications she uses work almost the same as on Windows. One thing that Sophie misses is Micros*ft OneNote which she used for taking notes, organizing and structuring them, and if needed creating a Word document out of it for presentation to customers. She uses OpenOffice Writer and BasKet for quick notes, but the lack of co-operation of these applications annoys her.

When Sophie has been the one who took the meeting protocol, she hasn't found a way yet to easily share it with the other participants.

Sophie has baskets for

• taking phone notes,
• recording protocols on meetings,
• project-specific ideas, preliminary plans etc.,
• brainstorming on new project ideas,
• frequent computer problems and their solutions, e.g. about OpenOffice annoyances,
• simple planning activities (for small teamwork projects), like timeplans, to-do lists or staff assignment,
• customer contact infos she's likely to use only a few times.

Sophie frequently has to transfer notes, especially contact information and accompanying notes, from phone and other notes to the addressbook application (Kontact). She would really love it if she could make a contact entry from a note or link a contact information to a note in both directions.

With OneNote, she could share a notepad across the local network. She used this feature for protocols which she made available for all. Co-workers could correct errors and used it as a reliable mechanism to always have the current protocol on their desktops.

When brainstorming, Sophie is unhappy that she is limited to textual notes in BasKet. She would like flow-charting capabilities for that, like bubbles and arrows to connect objects, and free-hand drawing. She does not like drawing programs for this because they are not quick enough to use and the results are too isolated in the filesystem.

For personal things, she uses a piece of paper, but she would like it if she could use the PC for that and get those notes into her home PC somehow.