Survey Personas (2017)
- XWiki
- Requirements
- Completed
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica)- Survey Personas 2017 (Apr 2, 2018) https://markmail.org/thread/77y277sf3db4hhla
Description
Determining the personas for an open source project can be difficult since the communication with the end-user is very limited. Surveys are one of the communication forms that we can use to extract some data.
I will use the data given to us within the XWiki Feedback survey. This survey is an optional one and we have data since June 2016. We had 20 responses for 2016, 31 responses for 2017 and 4 responses for 2018 (analysis written at the beginning of April). I will focus the analysis on the 2017 entries since they contain a whole year of data. Not all the survey fields have complete responses, but the entries are validated as coming from actual users. The last analysis had 34 responses, while this one has 31 responses, so the results are closely comparable.
Attributes
Utility
The majority of our users are using XWiki as a Knowledge Base (60%). This percent dropped since the last analysis (72.7%), but continues to be the main use case. The following percentage goes to Project Management (13.3%), compared to the last analysis when it was Intranets (12.1%).
Period
90% of the respondents are using XWiki for less than 6 months. This data could signify that newcomers are trying to provide feedback and try to find some answers on the website, and don't necessarily reflect the global usage of the product. Still the percentage being so high would give us insight on how a new comers feels about the product by analyzing the next attributes. 
System
53.5% of 2017's respondents are using a Windows system. This stat is really interesting since it does not align with our last analysis or the general one, where Linux had the majority. This could signify an increase in usage on Windows or a correction of this attribute by having more / other respondents. Still this attribute should get a persona characteristic dedicated to it.
Location
The majority of users are using XWiki at the Office (66.7%). This seems to remain a constant attribute. 
Country
The majority of respondents are from USA, Russia and China, with other European countries coming as second entries. Still the questions and answers were written in English, so this is something to consider. 
Role
The roles provided were normalized in order to get some grouping. We have a large percentage of Software Engineers and System Administrators, while the other percentages goes into an User and an Evaluator persona.
Version
In terms of version, Stable remains as the preferred option (80%). This is interesting from a committer / developer perspective since we think our users should use / prefer the LTS version. One possible hypothesis could be that the respondents don't know the difference between the versions (maybe they pay or not attention on the Download page), but are biased / targeted using a "stable" version.
Personas
| UTILITY | PERIOD | SYSTEM | VERSION | LOCATION | COUNTRY | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ROLE | KB | PM | Other | Less than 6 months | Windows | Linux | Stable | at Office | at Home | USA | Russia | China | Europe* | |
| Administrator | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ● | ● | ○ | |||||||
| Developer | ● | ○ | ● | ○ | ○ | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | ||||
| Evaluator | ○ | ● | ○ | ● | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | |||||
| User | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | ○ | |||||
Administrator
Using as Knowledge Base, for less than 6 months, both Linux and Windows, the Stable version, using it at Office, from USA, configuring LDAP, AD and Tomcat
Developer
Using as Knowledge Base (+other), for less than 6 months, both Linux and Windows, the Stable version, using it at Office, from China, needing usage documentation and concerned about UI aspects (installation, configuration, development)
Evaluator
Using as Project Management (+other), for less than 6 months, majority on Windows, the Stable version, both at Home and Office, from an European country
User
Using as Knowledge Base, for less than 6 months, both Linux and Windows, the Stable version, using it at Home / Office, from Russia / SUA, Academia, using it for taking notes, writing mathematical formulas and latex
