MATURE Deliverable 1. - Knowledge Maturing

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Figure 8: Graphical Representation of Personas in PROMOTE 5
As mentioned before, Personas must come to life in designers’ minds in order to exploit the potential of
this approach. We felt that 21 Personas are too many to be kept in mind in detail when designing the
system and also neglect the suggestion by (Randolph, 2004) that it is sensible to concentrate on one or a
small number of primary Personas. An initial idea to reduce the number of Personas was discarded,
because we figured that each of the Personas was a valuable means for discussion in the local context of
co-working Personas in the studied organizations for selected design issues. For the purpose of
remembering Personas’ characteristics in consortium-wide discussions, however, it was deemed
necessary to keep the number of Personas small. Pursuing this aim, FZI, UIBK and UPB worked on
approaches to cluster the Personas in order to prepare an informed decision about selecting a (small)
number of primary Personas. In preparation of the 4 th consortium meeting from 28th to 30th January 2009
in Olten, each of those three consortium partners developed independently one possibility to cluster
Personas with regard to their characteristics.
Although the 21 identified Personas vary in the way they perform tasks as well as in their behaviour,
needs and objectives, it was possible to identify pools of Personas with similar characteristics. As one
example of clustering, the approach adopted by UIBK is described in more detail in the following.
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Sources for the pictures (creative commons): http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/399111745/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterlozano/2831110288/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/george_reyes/2309222494/
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Please note that characteristics have been abbreviated with respect to the ones described in table 4.
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