anything from block ads to allow web developers to dynamically adjust the layout of web pages. Traditionally, installing software has been possible using a variety of approaches: installers, package archives, compiling code, and more. The Firefox team made it as simple as selecting an add-on and clicking Install. Firefox takes care of the rest. Workflow and usability are close companions. Another successful workflow example comes from Bytemark Hosting (http://www.bytemark .co.uk/ ). This small hosting company provides virtual hosting machines that run Linux. If my machine was unresponsive for some reason, they offered a command-line-driven administration console that I could log into. That console let me restart the machine and gather diagnostic information. Although it might have seemed complex and technical to the average Firefox user, the console was fast, efficient, and intuitive for most Linux users. If a machine was down, I could be into the console within minutes and have it back up again, all from my familiar command-line interface. The connection between both of these examples is the first task in understanding workflow: know your audience.
Roles People always have expectations. Our job is to understand, predict, and cater to fair expectations in our target audience. To understand these expectations, we need to understand our audience. Although communities are a breeding ground for diversity of personality, experience, and background, we can often see similarities in expectations, skills, experience, and approaches between people who have a shared interest in a particular type of work, be it programming, documentation, testing, advocacy, or whatever else. Consider programmers as an example. We know that we can assume a certain amount of technical knowledge: programmers indulge in a technical art form. They spend their days engaging in technical conversations and manipulating technology to their needs. You can’t push these assumptions too far, though. A Windows power user and a low-level assembly device driver writer are both “technically trained,� but in different ways. Technical experience comes in many forms. It is important for us to see the correlations, but also to keep track of subcategories. Roles are critical in identifying preconceptions and experience. Using programmers again as an example, it is reasonable to assume that a programmer will know how to use an operating system reasonably well, know much of the jargon associated with computers, and be fairly self-sufficient in solving technical problems. Each of these attributes is common in programmers. We draw these parallels from two primary methods: observation and experience. Understanding the audience requires observing them in their natural environment. If you want to make bug triage as simple as possible, sit down and watch someone triage a number of bugs. In fact, watch a range of people triage bugs. If you want to understand how to run a booth at
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