research-article

Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study

Author:

Erin FriessAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 1209 - 1218

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208572

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Personas have become a well-lauded method to aid designers in keeping the needs of the intended user population at the forefront of the design process. However, few studies have ethnographically observed design teams that use personas, and fewer studies have looked specifically at how designers linguistically invoke personas in their decision-making sessions. This discourse analysis of the decision-making sessions of designers at a top tier design firm reveals that although the designers dedicate much time researching, developing, and refining personas, personas themselves make relatively few appearances in the designers' language during decision-making sessions. This study shows that, for persuasive ends, these designers, who are advocates of personas, routinely use other less precise and more designer-centric linguistic mechanisms in lieu of personas. Despite the scarcity of personas in the decision-making sessions, this ethnographic case study also explores the value of personas for this team even when the personas are not explicitly linguistically invoked.

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Cited By

Amer jid Almahri FBell DGulzar Z(2024)Chatbot Technology Use and Acceptance Using Educational PersonasInformatics10.3390/informatics1102003811:2(38)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics11020038
Şengün SSalminen JJung SAldous KJansen B(2024)“There’s Something About Noura”: Exploring Think-Aloud Reasonings for Users’ Persona Choice in a Design TaskProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661512(1234-1247)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661512
Bayeck R(2023)Is Microethnography an Ethnographic Case Study? and/or a mini-ethnographic case study? An analysis of the literatureInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods10.1177/1609406923117207422Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231172074
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2012

3276 pages

ISBN:9781450310154

DOI:10.1145/2207676

General Chair:
Joseph A. Konstan
University of Minnesota
,
Program Chairs:
Ed H. Chi
Google
,
Kristina Höök
Mobile Life at KTH

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 May 2012

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May 5 - 10, 2012

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Citations

Cited By

Amer jid Almahri FBell DGulzar Z(2024)Chatbot Technology Use and Acceptance Using Educational PersonasInformatics10.3390/informatics1102003811:2(38)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics11020038
Şengün SSalminen JJung SAldous KJansen B(2024)“There’s Something About Noura”: Exploring Think-Aloud Reasonings for Users’ Persona Choice in a Design TaskProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661512(1234-1247)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661512
Bayeck R(2023)Is Microethnography an Ethnographic Case Study? and/or a mini-ethnographic case study? An analysis of the literatureInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods10.1177/1609406923117207422Online publication date: 24-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231172074
Kaate ISalminen JSantos JJung SOlkkonen RJansen B(2023)The realness of fakesInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103096178:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103096
Doherty M(2023)Distinguishing User Paths for Personas and Stakeholders Through Motives and Decision MakingHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42293-5_55(464-468)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42293-5_55
Boyle RPledger RBrown HVanderbilt R(2023)A Case Study in Organizational Adoption of User Personas: Assessing Perceptions, Awareness, and Hesitation to AdoptDesign, User Experience, and Usability10.1007/978-3-031-35699-5_5(51-65)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35699-5_5
Gentes APerez A(2022)Le « traduire » comme paradigme de la pratique du design“Translate” as a Paradigm of Design PracticeAppareil10.4000/appareil.4427Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.4000/appareil.4427
Salminen JJansen BJung SBellogin ABoratto LSantos OArdissono LKnijnenburg B(2022)Survey2Persona: Rendering Survey Responses as PersonasAdjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3511047.3536403(67-73)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3511047.3536403
Salminen JNielsen LBahloul MJørgensen RSantos JJung SJansen B(2022)Persona preparedness: a survey instrument for measuring the organizational readiness for deploying personasInformation Technology and Management10.1007/s10799-022-00373-925:2(173-198)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-022-00373-9
Li E(2022)Use Persona and Semantic Differential Method to Assist Undergraduate Students Learning Product DesignHCI International 2022 – Late Breaking Papers: Ergonomics and Product Design10.1007/978-3-031-21704-3_30(445-460)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21704-3_30
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