research-article

How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas?

Authors:

Tejinder Judge,

Steve WhittakerAuthors Info & Claims

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

Pages 1219 - 1228

https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208573

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Personas are a critical method for orienting design and development teams to user experience. Prior work has noted challenges in justifying them to developers. In contrast, it has been assumed that designers and user experience professionals - whose goal is to focus designs on targeted users - will readily exploit personas. This paper examines that assumption. We present the first study of how experienced user-centered design (UCD) practitioners with prior experience deploying personas, use and perceive personas in industrial software design. We identify limits to the persona approach in the context studied. Practitioners used personas almost exclusively for communication, but not for design. Participants identified four problems with personas, finding them abstract, impersonal, misleading and distracting. Our findings argue for a new approach to persona deployment and construction. Personas cannot replace immersion in actual user data. And rather than focusing on creating engaging personas, it is critical to avoid persona attributes that mislead or distract.

References

[1]

Blomquist, A., Arvola, M. (2002). Personas in action: Ethnography in an interaction design team. Proc. of NordiCHI. 197--200.

Digital Library

[2]

Bødker, S. (2000). Scenarios in user-centred design: Setting the stage for reflection and action. Interacting with computers, 13(1), 61--75.

[3]

Chang, Y., Lim, Y., Stolterman, E. Personas: From theory to practices. Proceedings of NordiCHI. 439--442.

Digital Library

[4]

Chapman, C. N., Milham, R. (2006). The personas' new clothes: Methodological and practical arguments against a popular method. Proc. of HFES. 634--636.

[5]

Cooper, A. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum: Why high-tech products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity. Sams Publishers.

Digital Library

[6]

Cooper, A., Reimann, R. (2003). About face 2.0: The essentials of interaction design. Wiley Publishing.

Digital Library

[7]

Goodwin, K., Cooper, A. (2009). Designing for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services. Wiley Publishing.

Digital Library

[8]

DiMicco, J., Millen, D. R., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., and Muller, M. 2008. Motivations for social networking at work. In Proc. CSCW 2008. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[9]

Dotan, A., Maiden, N., Lichtner, V., Germanovich, L. (2009). Designing with only four people in mind?: A case study of using personas to redesign a workintegrated learning support system. Proceedings of INTERACT. 497--509.

Digital Library

[10]

Ehrlich, K., Shami, N. S. (2010). Microblogging inside and outside the workplace. Proc. of ICWSM.

[11]

Faily, S., Flechais, I. (2011). Persona cases: A technique for grounding personas. Proc. of CHI. 2267--2270.

Digital Library

[12]

Grudin, J. (1994). Groupware and social dynamics: Eight challenges for developers. Communications of the ACM, 37(1), 92--105.

Digital Library

[13]

Grudin, J. (2006). Why personas work: The psychological evidence. In J. Pruitt and T. Adlin (eds.) The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind throughout the product design, 642--664. Morgan Kaufman.

[14]

Grudin, J., Pruitt, J. (2002). Personas, participatory design and product development: An infrastructure for engagement. Proc. of the Participatory Design Conference. 144--161.

[15]

Judge, T., Matthews, T., Whittaker, S. (2012). Comparing collaboration and individual personas for the design and evaluation of collaboration software. Proc. of CHI.

Digital Library

[16]

Long, F (2009). Real or Imaginary; The effectiveness of using personas in product design. Proc. of the Irish Ergonomics Society Annual Conference. 1--10.

[17]

Matthews, T., Whittaker, S., Moran, T., Yuen, S., Judge, T. (2012). Productive Interrelationships Between Collaborative Groups Ease the Challenges of Dynamic and Multi-Teaming. Computer Supported Co-operative Work, doi=10.1007/s10606-011-9154-y.

Digital Library

[18]

Matthews, T., Whittaker, S., Moran, T., Yuen, S. (2011). Collaboration personas: A new approach to designing workplace collaboration tools. Proc. of CHI. 2247--2256.

Digital Library

[19]

McGinn, J., Kotamraju, N. Data-driven persona development. Proceedings of CHI. 1521--1524.

Digital Library

[20]

Nielsen, L. (2004). Engaging Personas and Narrative Scenarios. Copenhagen, Samfundslitteratur. Ph.D. Dissertation.

[21]

Pruitt, J., Adlin, T. (2006). The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind throughout the product design. Morgan Kaufman.

Digital Library

[22]

Pruitt, J., Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: Practice and theory. Proceedings of DUX.

Digital Library

[23]

Rönkkö, K. (2005). An empirical study demonstrating how different design constraints, project organization, and contexts limited the utility of personas. Proc. of HICSS.

Digital Library

[24]

Rönkkö, K., Hellman, M., Kilander, B., Dittrich, Y. (2004). Personas is not applicable: local remedies interpreted in a wider context. Proc. of Participatory Design Conference. 112--120.

Digital Library

[25]

Sinha, R. (2003). Persona development for information-rich domains. Proceedings of CHI. 830--831.

Digital Library

[26]

Skeels, M. M., Grudin, J. (2009). When social networks cross boundaries: A case study of workplace use of Facebook and LinkedIn. Proc. of GROUP. 95--104.

Digital Library

Cited By

Karanassios CHadan HZhang-Kennedy LAssal H(2024)Towards Security-Focused Developer PersonasProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685406(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685406
Salminen JJung SJansen B(2024)Investigating Persona Viewing Behavior: An Eye-Tracking Study on Portrait-Format Persona ProfileProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685376(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685376
Nemcova VKunešová VMikulik RKnoche H(2024)Focusing on what matters: Crafting stroke survivor personas relevant to systems supporting their self-managementAdjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3677045.3685419(1-7)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677045.3685419
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas?
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study
CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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 ...
Comparing collaboration and individual personas for the design and evaluation of collaboration software
CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Collaboration personas are a tool that can be used to design for groups. Prior work posits that collaboration personas can improve tool adoption by helping designers create collaboration tools that are better targeted to the goals, needs, and ...
How Related Are Designers to the Personas They Create?
Design, User Experience, and Usability: Design Thinking and Practice in Contemporary and Emerging Technologies
Abstract
In the world of User Experience (UX), personas are tools that represent what designers learn during research into potential customers and a population that might use a product, website, service, or represent a brand. They also serve to help ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

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]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 05 May 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '12

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '12: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 5 - 10, 2012

Texas, Austin, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,150 of 8,491 submissions, 25%

Upcoming Conference

CHI '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

151
Total Citations
View Citations
3,978
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)475
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)50

Reflects downloads up to 14 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Karanassios CHadan HZhang-Kennedy LAssal H(2024)Towards Security-Focused Developer PersonasProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685406(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685406
Salminen JJung SJansen B(2024)Investigating Persona Viewing Behavior: An Eye-Tracking Study on Portrait-Format Persona ProfileProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685376(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685376
Nemcova VKunešová VMikulik RKnoche H(2024)Focusing on what matters: Crafting stroke survivor personas relevant to systems supporting their self-managementAdjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3677045.3685419(1-7)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677045.3685419
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
Shin JHedderich MRey BLucero AOulasvirta A(2024)Understanding Human-AI Workflows for Generating PersonasProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660729(757-781)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3660729
Esfahani SDe Toni GLepri BPasserini ATentori KZancanaro M(2024)Preference Elicitation in Interactive and User-centered Algorithmic Recourse: an Initial ExplorationProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3627043.3659556(249-254)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627043.3659556
Xiang WZhu HLou SChen XPan ZJin YChen SSun L(2024)SimUser: Generating Usability Feedback by Simulating Various Users Interacting with Mobile ApplicationsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642481(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642481
Salminen JLiu CPian WChi JHäyhänen EJansen B(2024)Deus Ex Machina and Personas from Large Language Models: Investigating the Composition of AI-Generated Persona DescriptionsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642036(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642036
Arevalo Arboleda SConde MDoering NRaake AGrollman DBroadbent EJu WSoh HWilliams T(2024)Introducing Personas and Scenarios to Highlight Older Adults' Perspectives on Robot-Mediated CommunicationCompanion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610978.3640659(209-213)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610978.3640659
Karolita DGrundy JKanij TMcIntosh JObie H(2024)Lessons Learned from Persona Usage in Requirements Engineering Practice2024 IEEE 32nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE59067.2024.00021(116-128)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/RE59067.2024.00021
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents