Reengineering persona development through the support of technology

A Persona is a fictitious individual user who represents a group of real users with common goals and needs. To represent the variety of users of a particular product or service, a set of personas are created where each denotes a group of users who have similar behaviors, attitudes, aptitudes and needs towards the use of the product/service. Personas are based on user research and studies where the data collected is analyzed and synthesized to model these group of users. Personas allow stakeholders, customers and participants of the design team to understand the users of a product, communicate about their user needs and select the user archetype that the product is intended to serve. Personas are also used as a tool that allows designers to verify their product /service designs with the identified user groups that present the users archetypes.

Recently, there have been conflicting views on whether to adopt user personas as a design tool for developing products or services of technology. In theory, constructing personas is an essential step of the User Centered Design (USD) process and is beneficial in delivering products/services that meet the users’ goals and needs. This perspective remains common across the four different models suggested by Copper A. (2007), Pruitt (2003, 2010), Mulders’ (2007) and Nielson (2010). However, when it comes to practice, practitioners in organizations adopting User Experience (UX) design and students of Interaction Design (ID) have raised some concerns related to issues faced when constructing personas. Thus, the use of constructed personas for the design of a product or a service has become doubtful, questionable and less common over the past few years.

This paper aims at revealing some preliminary findings related to the issues and concerns of developing personas. This will be achieved through a combination of theoretical and applied domains. In effect, the methodology comprises first undertaking a critical review of the three renowned models for persona development (Cooper’s, Pruitt’s and Nielson’s), second presenting the practitioners’ opinions on personas based on what has been publicized (Bryan P 2013; Kellingley N. (n.d.)) and research studies (Long F. 2009; Mathews T. 2012), third looking upon available ID students’ work when developing personas using Cooper’s method.

Based on this three-tier methodology, the following findings are derived

There is no unified model or practice for constructing personas.

Building valid and representative personas requires sound user research, coupled with substantial datasets.

The process of building personas is a complex one, as it is time consuming, mentally exhausting, and requires expertise in user research mainly at the level of qualitative analysis.

Most of the processes for building personas are manual and there are no tools that help in simplifying the process.

Collaboration is essential when developing personas; however the methods and practices don’t specify modes of employing it.

These findings point to challenges at the level of constructing personas. However, if the process of constructing personas is somewhat reengineered, there would still be potential to adopt personas as a design tool (Nielson L. 2013; Sholmo, G. 2014). In this context, the reconfigured process would bring the manual work to a minimum at selected stages, as well as allow collaboration amongst design team with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency and productivity of constructing personas. Hence, the use of technology provides an opportunity to digitize selected phases to secure a smooth workflow across all stages of persona development. In this respect, digitization would not eliminate the users’ involvement in creating personas but rather aid them to produce valid and representative personas.

The paper provides a prospect for future work where a proposed model for developing personas needs to be engineered. It would be based on theoretical foundations and close involvement of UX practitioners and ID students. The latter is essential for reaching an understanding of the current practices and challenges facing persona development in the ID field. Once constructed, the model needs to be verified – with practitioners and ID students – for its design and applicability. Accordingly, a system for creating personas would be developed to digitize the selected stages. Eventually, this system would be subject to a comparative evaluation by both parties, where its results are assessed against the preceding approaches for creating personas and its usability is verified.