LinuxWorld: UserLinux: Taking ‘Grandma’ as the Use Case

“Grandma doesn’t know much about computers, but she really
enjoys collecting pictures of the family, and keeping in touch via
e-mail. In fact, she is so comfortable now with e-mail, that she
doesn’t call each time to make sure we got it. Her ‘Web surfing’
consists of placing an occasional order at harryanddavid.com. Oh,
and she does use Word for Windows to write a newsletter for her
church group. She does not use any advanced features of Word, so
switching her to OpenOffice is not a problem.

“Grandma’s computer is an old 486 with 12MB memory running
Windows 95. It takes forever to start, and hangs frequently,
resulting in calls to Kristin, her niece and family computer
expert. Kristin is an engineer at a small company that has Debian
installed on a few of their computers. She is the one who wrote
those handy little cards for Grandma–how to start the computer,
how to print a picture, etc…”

Complete
Story