Equinox p2 UI Use Cases

p2 UI Users and Use Cases Workflows to drive the 3.5 p2 UI

This page captures our thoughts about the kinds of users using the Eclipse SDK p2 UI and the things these users are trying to do.

One goal in building the Eclipse 3.4 p2 UI was to simplify the number of steps and concepts for a less technical user of Eclipse. We often called this user "the RCP app" user and were somewhat influenced by "Samantha," a design persona developed by Mary Beth Raven to use in the UI design for some Lotus products (see Lotus personas). We also often discussed "current UM users" - the more technical Eclipse SDK users who want to closely manage their configuration and want to know the detailed ramifications of a provisioning operation.

As we made design and implementation tradeoffs to meet the 3.4 schedule, it became rather cumbersome to discuss some of these tradeoffs given we had not developed a vocabulary for talking about these personas. (For an example of the swirl, see Bug 224472.

To that end, we'll develop some simple personas to use in discussing the various scenarios and problems/improvements. Rather than interviewing a sample user base, I'm using bug reports, mailing list traffic, walkthroughs, and other feedback to define these users initially, and I welcome any and all help to iterate on these. Note that I'm not focusing on the personal (age, hobbies) and background (education) info of the users initially. If there is interest in further developing these personas, by all means please contribute.

The personas are defined in terms of the Eclipse SDK and products built on top of the SDK. We realize that some RCP app users don't fit these definitions at all, and alternate UI's will be built where appropriate in certain product. The UI class libraries are being designed to support reuse of the building blocks and different levels of integration/composition. But that is a topic for another page...

Any similarity between the persona names and real Eclipse SDK users is completely coincidental.

Eclipse SDK Personas

Steve

Steve is a power user of the Eclipse C++ and device tooling. He has intimate knowledge of underlying platform and device technology, and Eclipse is only one of many tools he is using in his job. (What others?) He does write the occasional bug report against Eclipse and keeps tabs on when new Eclipse function he needs is to be made available. He updates to new milestone builds when required function appears, and he might even take an integration build or maintenance branch build in order to test or verify a bug report he cares about. He wants to keep things simple and does not routinely browse for new plug-ins, although he might add a plug-in that he read about if he felt it would help his day-to-day tasks.

Karen

Karen is a committer on the Eclipse SDK project. She updates Eclipse to every integration build, and often takes nightly builds when needed for collaboration. She wants to have complete control over any additional bundle/plug-in being installed into her configuration. She has never used an update UI, preferring to unzip a clean build and copy her developer tools on top of the installation. She would like to switch over to using the p2 update technology for the good of the project, but doesn't quite trust it. She wants an easy way to configure her system from scratch.

Laurel

Laurel is a developer of modeling products for Eclipse, using Eclipse Modeling Tools as a base for her work. She is an active participant in the Eclipse community, keeping up-to-date on release planning and being a vocal submitter and commenter in bugzilla. She prides herself on being the first to try out a new plug-in and blog about it. She frequently installs plug-ins to check them out, and has submitted several bugs against Update Manager (and p2) to help simplify tasks. She has a good working knowledge of the various Eclipse components and projects. While she is not too concerned with the underlying mechanics of the install (directory locations, etc.), she does want to know what components are being installed and why. For example, if she wanted to install a plug-in that required an upgrade to GEF, she would want to know this.

Dave

Dave is an IT support tech in charge of internal deployment of a commercial product based on the Eclipse SDK. He wants to try out any and all updates or add-ons to the Eclipse environment before his users obtain access. He maintains an internal update repository for deploying approved Eclipse updates, patches, or add-ons. It is vital that Dave can configure the product so that users cannot update or add plug-ins from any other sources. He configures Eclipse to use automatic updating. Most of Dave's users aren't familiar with the Eclipse community. Those that are sometimes install and maintain their own Eclipse SDK, but Dave does not support these installs and generally discourages it.

Scenarios

Scenario 1: Check for updates of current system

Frequency and type of update is different for different users

Scenario 2: Browsing for cool add-ons using the Eclipse Update UI

How often does this really happen?

Scenario 4: What do I have?

(Needs to be fleshed into more scenarios...why am I wondering what I have? Is there a configuration problem? Do I need disk space? Do I need detail about a specific subcomponent?)

Scenario 6: Something is screwed up after updating or installing something

(Depending on the user, this might map to revert, or uninstall, or start from scratch...need to consider different personas)