MATURE Deliverable 1. - Knowledge Maturing

4.2 Personas
Modelling Personas is one promising approach to characterize user needs, work routines and learning
styles as proposed by (Cooper, 1999). Personas are useful in order to understand potential users in terms
of their needs, goals and characteristics regarding their future intended system usage. A Persona is a
precise description of a user’s characteristics and what he/she wants to accomplish (Cooper, 1999) and
represents a class of target users that is described with rich information (Aoyama, 2007). Besides its
usage for software designers, Personas can be used for communication with clients and stakeholders
(Chang et al., 2008). We are well aware of the fact that there is a plethora of related work investigating
person types from a psychological perspective (Bayne, 2004, Bayne, 2005, Bayne, 2006). However, these
general person types have not been analysed from a learning perspective and thus do not give any details
about how they handle knowledge (maturing).
According to Cooper, a Persona should be based on sound empirical fieldwork (Cooper, 1999).
Furthermore, Cooper and Reimann argue that a Persona should be mainly based on qualitative data
gathered through interviews or ethnographic fieldwork (Cooper and Reimann, 2003), however, it may
also include imaginary information (Junior and Filgueiras, 2005). A Persona can be developed according
to a single human being (Cooper, 1999) or as a mash-up of users with aggregated characteristics (Chang
et al., 2008). In any case, descriptions should be consistent and one Persona should be understood as one
individual. A big advantage is that the targeted audience of Personas develops its own picture of the
Persona as a human being. There is evidence that the audience typically tries to consider the Personas’
characteristics in communication and design activities (Chang et al., 2008). In order to reach its full
potential, Personas must come to life in the designers’ minds. Pictures or images of Personas can be used
in order to make them more memorable and to add realism (Junior and Filgueiras, 2005). Designers can
talk more easily about the needs and goals of a Persona than about abstract requirements (Blomquist and
Arvola, 2002).
Personas are part of the user-centred design approach which primarily focuses on requirements of the
potential user group. Randolph suggests that a system should be designed according to one primary
Persona whose needs are considered predominantly (Randolph, 2004). Thereby, Personas form important
communication media within the team of designers (Blomquist and Arvola, 2002). They are useful in
helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design. The
following list shows a selection of benefits of using Personas identified by Cooper as well as by Pruitt and
Adlin (Cooper, 1999, Pruitt and Adlin, 2006b):
‐ Personas help make user-centred design possible by putting users or more precisely information
about targeted users at the centre of design.
‐ Personas help team members share a specific, consistent understanding and can be used to help
guide decisions, e.g., about the product’s navigation scheme and visual design.
‐ The development of solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs, attitudes and
behaviour patterns of Personas.
‐ Personas provide a human "face" so as to focus empathy on the people represented by the
demographics.
Personas have also been introduced building on lessons learned from the EU-funded projects APOSDLE
(see Dotan et al., 2009) and NEPOMUK (see Gudjónsdóttir and Lindquist, 2008).
In MATURE, Personas have been used in order to reap these benefits. Personas provide one possibility to
generalize individual observations that have been made during the ethnographic study (see section 3).
Furthermore, usage of Personas goes along with the aim of modelling users in a semi-formal manner and
supporting the communication process during delivery or mediation, respectively, of outcomes of the
ethnographic study to those developers who have not participated in the ethnographic study 2 .
2 As mentioned in section 3.1, some software developers have directly been involved in the ethnographic study so
that they could directly take on board their first-hand experiences into the software design process, the design
studies with application partners as well as the prototype development process.
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