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Personas - User Focused Design pp 1–24Cite as

Introduction: Stories About Users

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Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS,volume 15))

Abstract

In 1997, when I for the first time was going to work with ‘multimedia’, as it was called back then, it quickly dawned on me that I had to become more informed about who the users were. The task was to develop a small piece of software to help an unemployed person clarify what kind of work he or she wanted to do. I had spent a day with a lot of jobseekers and interviewed some of them. In order best to share my understanding of the job-seeking users with the project team that I worked with, I wrote a little story about 30-year-old Bente who falls pregnant while an apprentice in a shop and as a consequence abandon her apprenticeship. Later on, Bente gets jobs at various industrial companies, mostly temporary jobs and seasonal work. She feels secure in working with routine tasks so that she does not have to put too much thought into things but can concentrate on the work and let her mind wander. The last place she worked suddenly closed down and since then her job opportunities have been limited. Bente would like to get started on an education but is afraid that this is incompatible with a husband and raising a family. She would like to do something in commerce or something to do with people.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My first article on personas was published in (Nielsen, 1998), the translation is ‘Scenarios as development tool’. In the article, I coin what was later to be known personas, as model users.

  2. 2.

    You can find my Ph.D. dissertation at http://personaer.dk/wp-content/samlet-udgave-til-load.pdf. See Nielsen (2004).

  3. 3.

    Read more on the Scandinavian design tradition at Bødker et al. (2000).

  4. 4.

    See, for example, Orr (1996) and how it is described and how workers at Rank Xeros talk about the users.

  5. 5.

    The lifeworld can be defined as the reality you take for granted and judge with your common sense. See Schutz and Luckmann (1973), p. 3.

  6. 6.

    conzoom® segments the population according to where people live. It contains data about and the average age, education, job, type of housing and size of housing, income, capital, media use, use of transportation, consumption, interests, shopping and leisure habits, etc. Mini-Risc segments according to demography, income, life-view, and values

  7. 7.

    Microsoft has described how they do persona campaigns by hanging small posters on toilet doors and creating mugs with persona descriptions, photos, etc.

  8. 8.

    About the early history, see Goodwin (2001, 2002), and Brechin (2002). Alan Cooper has written two books, see Cooper (1999) and Cooper et al. (2007).

  9. 9.

    Both within psychology and sociology anonymous meetings are described. Within sociology, the term the anonymous is described as ‘a representation of a type’, within psychology the term stereotype is used. You can read more about types and stereotypes at Schutz and Luckmann (1973) and Macrae and Bodehausen (2001). The difference between cliches and stereotypes can be described as follows: ‘Stereotypes differ from clichés in that the former reduce an entire class (e.g. fat people, depressed women, or post office workers), and let the reader assume the rest. In contrast, a cliché is a hackneyed phrase. A stereotype is not identical to the real thing. Stereotypes seem to work best when characters are not created to be deep, but only to be a mental picture’ (Edelstein 1999, p. 13).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interaction Design Group, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lene Nielsen

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  1. Lene Nielsen
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Nielsen, L. (2013). Introduction: Stories About Users. In: Personas - User Focused Design. Human–Computer Interaction Series, vol 15. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4084-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4084-9_1

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