Abstract
Persona-based design (PBD) has become a popular method for enabling design teams to reason and communicate about user-centered design issues and trade-offs. There is a growing body of literature that describes different ways in which personas have been applied by researchers and practitioners. Despite this diversity in practice the debates about the usefulness of PBD as a method treat it as a single design method that is either good or bad. As a result, the present authors feel it is important to look more critically at what different authors are doing when claiming to use the persona concept, and to develop a theoretical distinction between various persona kinds and their attributes, as well as different characteristics which individual personas may exhibit. This method of analyzing the creation of personas, they believe, can be applied to other design techniques, in order to gain a better understanding of how they work, and how different methods of application can have different consequences for the resultant designs.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the many students they have had in their classes who have struggled to understand personas with them. Their insights have been valuable, and the authors’ informal observations of their actions have led them to a much richer understanding of personas, both in how they work well, and in how they can be inadvertently misused. They would also like to thank the many reviewers whose comments on various versions of this paper have been invaluable for helping them construct this final draft. Finally, they would like to thank the Research Writing Group at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Their feedback was vital for helping the authors reconceptualize their project as more than a critique of critiques, or the generation of a simple typology.
Notes
1. We use the term “ontology” loosely here. We do not mean to imply that what we have developed should be considered as a formal, precise account. Rather we are trying to avoid some words such as taxonomy or typology that have more specific implications which we do not intend our work to carry.