Abstract
Personas is a suggested method to extend IT professionals' understanding of users and users’ needs. A common advantage expressed is that personas extend the IT professionals’ empathy for the users, but a disadvantage is that personas are typically defined at the start of a software project and gradually are forgotten, since there is little reference to the personas through the software development project. In this paper we report experiences of coaching IT professionals in defining agile user stories based on personas, called: Persona User Stories (PUS). The aim of these workshops, was to extend the usage of personas and thereby extend the IT professionals’ understanding of their users. In a research project with three companies, we coached teams of IT professionals in three-hour workshops with 76 participants in total. The workshops were conducted at each company using personas already defined by the IT professionals. The persona descriptions were based on three types of information: (a) assumptions, (b) secondary research, and (c) data specific to a project. Our findings show that personas based on assumptions result in the participants questioning the description of the personas and having difficulties in understanding the personas. For making the persona user stories (PUS), the participants used themselves more often as a reference when working with the assumption based personas, than the participants using the other two types of personas.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
An, J., et al.: Imaginary people representing real numbers: generating personas from online social media data. ACM Trans. Web. 12, 4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3265986
Aoyama, M.: Persona-and-scenario based requirements engineering for software embedded in digital consumer products. In: 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering RE05 (2005)
Brown, D.: Agile User Experience Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Making It Work. Newnes, Oxford (2012)
Chamberlain, S., Sharp, H., Maiden, N.: Towards a framework for integrating agile development and user-centred design. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Succi, G. (eds.) XP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4044, pp. 143–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11774129_15
Cleland-Huang, J., Czauderna, A., Keenan, E.: A persona-based approach for exploring architecturally significant requirements in agile projects. In: Doerr, J., Opdahl, A.L. (eds.) REFSQ 2013. LNCS, vol. 7830, pp. 18–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37422-7_2
Cohn, M.: User Stories Applied. Pearson Education Incorporated, San Francisco (2004)
Cooper, A.: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, (vol. 2). Sams, Indianapolis (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-99786-9_1.
Coplan, A.: Understanding empathy: its features and effects. In: Coplan, A., Goldie, P. (eds.) Empathy – Philosophical and Psychological Perspective. University Press, Oxford (2011)
Friess, E.: Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1209–1218 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208572
Goodman, E., et al.: Observing the user experience: a practitioner’s guide to user research (second edition). IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun. 6(3), 260–261 (2013)
Gothelf, J., Seiden, J.: Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience. O’Reilly Media Inc, Sebastopol (2013)
Grudin, J., Pruitt, J.: Personas, participatory design and product development: an infrastructure for engagement. In: Proceeding of the PDC Conference, vol. 2, pp. 144–152 (2002)
Guba, E.G., Lincoln, Y.S.: Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In: Handbook of Qualitative Research, vol. 2, pp. 105, 163–194 (1994)
Hudson, W.: User stories don’t help users. Interactions 20, 50–53 (2013)
Hussain, Z., et al.: Agile user-centered design applied to a mobile multimedia streaming application. In: Holzinger, A. (ed.) USAB 2008. LNCS, vol. 5298, pp. 313–330. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89350-9_22
Jia, Y., Larusdottir, M.K., Cajander, Å.: The usage of usability techniques in scrum projects. In: Winckler, M., Forbrig, P., Bernhaupt, R. (eds.) HCSE 2012. LNCS, vol. 7623, pp. 331–341. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34347-6_25
Jung, H.Y.: The structures of the life-world. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, pp. xxxvi, 335. $10.50 (1973). By Schutz, A., Luckmann, T. Translated from the German by Zaner, R.M., Tristram Engelhardt Jr, H. American Political Science Review. (1974). https://doi.org/10.2307/1959185
Liikkanen, L.A., et al.: Lean UX - the next generation of user-centered agile development? In: Proceedings of the NordiCHI 2014: The 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational (2014)
Neate, T., et al.: Co-created personas: engaging and empowering users with diverse needs within the design process. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’19, New York, New York, USA, pp. 1–12 (2019)
Newton, K., Riggs, M.J.: Everybody’s talking but who’s listening? Hearing the user’s voice above the noise, with content strategy and design thinking. VALA2016: libraries, technology and the future (2016)
Nielsen, L., et al.: A template for design personas: analysis of 47 persona descriptions from Danish industries and organizations. Int. J. Sociotechnol. Knowl. Dev. 7(1), 45–61 (2015). https://doi.org/10.4018/ijskd.2015010104
Nielsen, L.: Engaging personas and narrative scenarios. Ph.D. series 17, Copenhagen Business School (2004)
Nielsen, L.: Personas - user focused design (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1
Norman, D.: Ad-Hoc personas & empathetic focus. Jnd.Org. (2004)
Oderkirk, E., Jung, K.: From connect-exchange to ConnectX (2015)
Pruitt, J., Adlin, T.: The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington (2006)
Bhattarai, R., Joyce, G., Dutta, S.: Information security application design: understanding your users. In: Tryfonas, T. (ed.) HAS 2016. LNCS, vol. 9750, pp. 103–113. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39381-0_10
Rooksby, J., Dimitrov, K.: Trustless education? A blockchain system for university grades. In: New Value Transactions Understanding and Designing for Distributed Autonomous Organisations Workshop at DIS 2017 (2017)
Salminen, J., et al.: A literature review of quantitative persona creation. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, April 2020, pp. 1–14 (2014)
Salminen, J., Guan, K., Nielsen, L., Jung, S.-G., Jansen, B.J.: A template for data-driven personas: analyzing 31 quantitatively oriented persona profiles. In: Yamamoto, S., Mori, H. (eds.) HCII 2020. LNCS, vol. 12184, pp. 125–144. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50020-7_8
Salminen, J., Jansen, B.J., An, J., Kwak, H., Jung, S.-G.: Automatic persona generation for online content creators: conceptual rationale and a research agenda. In: Personas - User Focused Design. HIS, pp. 135–160. Springer, London (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1_8
Sedano, T., et al.: The product backlog. In: Proceedings of the 41th International Conference on Software Engineering; ICSE’19 (2019)
Using Proto-Personas for Executive Alignment: (2012). https://uxmag.com/articles/using-proto-personas-for-executive-alignment
Winter, D., et al.: Persona driven agile development build up a vision with personas, sketches and persona driven user stories. In: Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI) (2012)
Acknowledgement
This research is supported by Infinit – Network for digital innovation and new technology and Jeppe Emil Kjøller.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nielsen, L., Larusdottir, M., Larsen, L.B. (2021). Understanding Users Through Three Types of Personas. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12933. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85616-8_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85615-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85616-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)