User:Tictric

tictric AT jabber.ccc.de if you really need to contact me directly :)

A Nanny for our time problems

Having two kids, I discovered that they tend to spend more then sufficient time in front of our computer. Not that I don't appreciate their efforts to learn to use this complex worktool, but I think there's other important things to learn too.

In short, I want to give them sufficient time per week or month to make themselves even more familiar with our workstation but I don't want to stay guard all the time that they don't sit in front of it longer than allowed (and good for them). Unfortunately there's no tool with GUI so far, that I could get hold of that would assist me managing the time my kids may spend with processing data.

Therefore I propose (or rather put up to discussion) the development of Nanny.

Project User Research Profile

Kim and Joe've got two children. Jil and Moe. Jil goes to primary, Moe to secondary school. They, like their parents, love to work (play) with the computer in their home office. They show a tendency to sit rather longer than shorter in front of the screen and this causes trouble because Kim and Joe think their minds are too immature for a constant exposition to this technique. And also there's more important skills for children to master and be it only to jump and run and cycle and what not.

So Kim fires up the workstation and logs into her account on a KDE-Desktop. In system-settings, on the advanced tab she finds a button for Nanny. She opens the settings dialog, activates administrator mode and selects Jils user account.

Now she can set a time limit for Jil in hours and a time period the time credit is valid for in days, weeks or months. Since Jil almost only uses the computer only for playing rather silly games, like Kim thinks, Kim decides that Jil shouldn't spend more than 2 hours a week in front of the computer and restricts the time per session to 30 minutes.

Moe, being older, not only plays games but also uses the computer for his homework and emails with his friends. So Kim and Joe think that he should have more time, like 1 hour a day maximum on the average. Now that Moe is already a big kid, he should also learn to household with his time credit as he sees fit and so he gets 30 hours per month which he has to

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More Information

Short introduction to user personas on Usability.gov

In-depth discussion about creating personas on Boxes and Arrows