Personas: practice and theory

ABSTRACT

ì Personasî is an interaction design technique with considerable potential for software product development. In three years of use, our colleagues and we have extended Alan Cooperís technique to make Personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. After describing and illustrating our approach, we outline the psychological theory that explains why Personas are more engaging than design based primarily on scenarios. As Cooper and others have observed, Personas can engage team members very effectively. They also provide a conduit for conveying a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data, and focus attention on aspects of design and use that other methods do not.

REFERENCES

• 1: Astington, J. W., & Jenkins, J. M. (1995). Theory of mind development and social understanding. Cognition and Emotion, 9, 151--65.
• 2: Benyon, D. & Macauley, C. (2002). Scenarios and the HCI-SE design problem. Interacting with computers, 14, 4, 397--405.
• 3: Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual design. Morgan Kaufmann.
• 4: Åsa Blomquist , Mattias Arvola, Personas in action: ethnography in an interaction design team, Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, October 19-23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark [doi>10.1145/572020.572044]
• 5: Brechin, E. (2002). Reconciling market segments and Personas. http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2002_02/reconcili ng_ market_seg ments_and_Personas.htm
• 6: Bødker, S. (2000). Scenarios in user-centred design- Setting the stage for reflection and action. Interacting with computers, 13, 1, 61--75.
• 7: John M. Carroll, Making Use: Scenario-Based Design of Human-Computer Interactions, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000
• 8: Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition), Pearson Higher Education, 2004
• 9: J. P. Djajadiningrat , W. W. Gaver , J. W. Fres, Interaction relabelling and extreme characters: methods for exploring aesthetic interactions, Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, p.66-71, August 17-19, 2000, New York City, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/347642.347664]
• 10: Freydenson, E. (2002). Bringing your Personas to life in real life. http://boxesandarrows.com/archives/002343.php
• 11: Goodwin, K. (2002). Goal-directed methods for great design. CHI 2002 tutorial. http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi2002/tut-sun.html#9
• 12: Grudin, J. & Pruitt, J. (2002). Personas, participatory design, and product development: An infrastructure for engagement. Proc. PDC 2002, 144--161.
• 13: JoAnn T. Hackos , Janice C. Redish, User and task analysis for interface design, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1998
• 14: Holtzblatt, K. (2002). Personas and contextual design. http://www.incent.com/community/design_corner/02_0913.html
• 15: Hourihan, M. (2002). Taking the "you" out of user: My experience using Personas. Boxes and arrows. http://boxesandarrows.com/archives/002330.php
• 16: Interview with Kim Goodwin (2002). User Interface 7 East.
• 17: http://www.uiconf.com/uie-7/goodwin_interview.htm
• 18: Mikkelson, N. & Lee, W. O. (2000). Incorporating user archetypes into scenario-based design. Proc. UPA 2000.
• 19: Moore, G. A. (1991). Crossing the chasm. Harper Collins Publishers, New York.
• 20: Lene Nielsen, From user to character: an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios, Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, June 25-28, 2002, London, England [doi>10.1145/778712.778729]
• 21: Perfetti, C. (2002). Personas: Matching a design to the users' goals. User Interface 7 East. http://www.uiconf.com/uie-7/goodwin_article.htm
• 22: Steven E. Poltrock , Jonathan Grudin, Organizational obstacles to interface design and development: two participant-observer studies, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.1 n.1, p.52-80, March 1994 [doi>10.1145/174630.174633]
• 23: Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 4, 515--526.
• 24: Pruitt, J. S., Jamesen, H. & Adlin, T. (2001). Personas, user archetypes, and other user representations in software design. UPA 2001 workshop. http://www.upassoc.org/conf2001/reg/program/worksh ops/w2.html
• 25: Pruitt, J. S., Jamesen, H. & Adlin, T. (2002). Creating and using personas: A practitioner's workshop. UPA 2002 workshop. http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/conferences/200 2/program/workshops/wkshop_Personas.php
• 26: Tahir, M. F. (1997). Who's on the other side of your software: Creating user profiles through contextual inquiry. Proc. UPA '97.
• 27: Value-sensitive design site: http://www.vsdesign.org/
• 28: Weinstein, Art, (1998). Defining your market: winning strategies for high-tech, industrial, and service firms. New York: Haworth Press.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
design method, personas, scenarios, user archetypes, user profiles, user research, user-centered design