KDE Visual Design Group/Plasma 5 Desktop Configuration

Plasma 5 Desktop Use and Configuration

Concept

See KDE HIG for guidelines on this design approach.

Plasma 5 Desktop Use and Configuration Vision

Plasma 5 Desktop provides an easy-to-use work space that effortlessly supports the familiar workflows of most users while providing the most flexible desktop environment available. Plasma 5's flexibility enables unparalleled customization of the user's work space to reflect their personal taste as well as powerful custom workflows for more technical users.

Plasma 5's flexibility does not come at the cost of ease-of-use. So instead of overwhelming the user with choices, Plasma 5 keeps the user focused by offering customization options when most relevant and useful.

Personas

Primary Persona

Susan - Recreational User, 34. While Susan seldom uses her computer for work, it has become an essential part of her social life. With her computer, she can be creative and spread this creativity in the world. She chats with her friends, shares music, playlists and other media, creates videos and uploads them to her web space, and runs a blog with her own style. She can't imagine a life without her laptop. Still, she is a fun person and does not want to worry about technical details. She expects her machine to work.

Secondary Personas

Matt - Student, 24. Matt is a geology student in the last year of his undergraduate studies. For him, technology is meant to take over annoying and repetitive tasks. For his student research projects, Matt has to do extensive research on the web, and has to manage pictures of stones and other geologic material. He gains credits by using his notes to create reports and presentations. Matt often struggles to keep track of all his notes. He is looking for an effective routine, so he can concentrate on the contents rather than on finding information.

Philip - Geek, 17. Philip is a college student in his last grade. Later, he wants to go to university to study computer science. He loves the challenge of making technology do what he wants it to do. When he was 14, he started to probe different programming languages, and since then has implemented various different applications he published under free licenses. He is convinced of Linux and the benefits of free software. Philip is fancy about technology and is never discouraged if something does not work as expected.

Scenarios

1. Susan does a lot of creative work on her computer and would like her computing environment to reflect the same expressiveness she puts into her creative work. She would like to use one of her many photographs as a back drop while using her computer. She selects the photograph she would like to use as a back drop and the result is an environment that better reflects Susan's personal tastes.
2. Susan does a lot of video and photo editing. She is used to her tools having a dark user interface when editing such content. She likes it because she finds it easier to focus on the video or photograph being editing. She customizes her Plasma 5 desktop so that her video and photo editing tools now use a dark user interface and she is satisfied that she can more easily focus on the content being edited.
3. Most of Susan's time using her computer is spent using an image editor, slideshow viewer, a video editor, video player and a web browser for creating and monitoring her blog. She would like to access those applications and her blog as quickly and easily as possible so set adds the applications and a shortcut to her blog to a panel for one-click access.
4. Philip came across a newly released icon set on the internet that he would love to use for a fresh new computing experience. He downloads it to his computer and installs it to get the fresh new computing experience he was looking for.
5. Matt uses five different computing tools for his Structural Geology research project which he works on for 3 hours each week. Once he realizes this, he sets up his Plasma 5 desktop to make this easier. Now when he returns to working on the project, he quickly opens all five tools and continues working on his assignment where he last left off.
6. Philip loves to customize his computing experience. For him, desktop customization is a creative exercise and so he customizes almost everything; wallpaper, panels, icons, colors and windows. Like any creative exercise he likes to share the result of his efforts with his friends. Once he is satisfied with a set of customizations, that he really likes, he shares it with his friends, who recreate them on their own computers.
7. Philip volunteers to set up computers for a local senior center. After doing it for a while he has settled on a common set of customizations that seems to work best for users there; larger fonts and icons, accessibility settings and an extra panel with applications he has observed that the seniors use the most. To ease set up each time, he saves this set of customizations then applies the saved set of customizations to each new computer he sets up. This way he saves a great deal of time setting up computers at the senior center.