Leveraging Personas for Social Impact: A Review of Their Applications to Social Good in Design

Abstract

Personas inform design by representing diverse user needs. Since their initial application in commercial technology contexts, personas have been adopted in several research domains for public good, such as health, accessibility, politics and civic society, education, sustainability, cybersecurity, and criminology. In this review paper, we analyzed 58 research studies that created personas in these domains, referred to as Personas for Social Good (PFSG). In most studies, PFSG was primarily exploratory and focused on initial methodology development. More than half (59%) neglected to discuss concerns with stereotyping or evaluate how personas contributed to improving social concerns in their respective domains. To facilitate a shift towards more socially conscious persona applications, we identified and critically examined the most comprehensive PFSG domain applications in our sample. Based on their strengths, we present an ecological framework to guide researchers in holistically aligning persona creation efforts with addressing critical social challenges.

Keywords:

• Personas
• social good
• sustainable development goals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION FOR THE SOCIAL GOOD https://ischool.uw.edu/about/ischool-2018/human-computer-interaction-social-good

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathleen W. Guan

Kathleen W. Guan holds a Master of Research in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology from University College London, for which she completed research training at Yale School of Medicine. With additional research interests in human-computer interaction, Kathleen is an incoming PhD candidate in Digital Health at Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands.

Joni Salminen

Joni Salminen is an Associate Professor at the School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa and Faculty Member at the Turku School of Economics, University of Turku in Finland. His current research focuses on data-driven personas, including computational challenges, information design, and value creation with humanized data representations.

Soon-Gyo Jung

Soon-gyo Jung received a BE degree in computer software from Kwangwoon University and an M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. He is a as a software engineer in the social computing group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute focused on data-driven/data-intensive systems.

Bernard J. Jansen

Bernard J. Jansen is a Principal Scientist in the social computing group of the Qatar Computing Research Institute. He is a graduate of West Point and has a PhD in computer science from Texas A&M University. Professor Jansen is editor-in-chief of the journal Information Processing & Management (Elsevier).