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Claim

We are using personas differently - - specifically, we are using personas and scenarios as part of a sense-making process, not for 'participatory design' or 'interaction design', etc., and that leads to a richer result.

Question

How are we using personas in our participatory design study that differs from how personas are currently being used in participatory design studies.

- The following refinement in question comes from reading Dervin: personas are about roles, not reification. So we have multiple-perspectives in MPDL, for example. Thus a persona represents a role that a participant plays, not a participant. A persona, Jane, may remind a participant of themselves in one role.

Ramblings

• Using personas as a framework for interacting with our community members
  • helps the designers
  • helps the users

• Instead of removing the persona from the picture, when the interaction design is done, the personas remain active products in our project.

• Providing a clear link between personas and web organization/information architecture.

• We theorize that people will make use of the navigation path(s) of personas that they identify with. (not necessarily similar to them)

• Can a male user identify with a female persona/vice-versa? (demographic issues?) Is a male user willing to accept a female persona to represent him and vice versa?

• Needs to be about roles, not objects.... Need to be clear that personas are about this is a part you play, not who you are....A not-so-subtle "this is who we think you are"

• We need to research and write something preliminary on "attitudes to the rights and rewards of contributors to non-school centered (open) digital repository"

• Our digital artifact is on the web and navigation is a major theme/component., thats why we feel comfortable trying to tie navigation to personas to users.

• Using personas in the user interface not just to drive the user interface design. (interaction design)

• Personas become an artifact of the project, so they're being actively developed (task-artifact lifecycle)
  • shared authorship - becomes a sense-making device
  • how will they and their navigation/interests change with time?
  • who will change them?

• Difference between
  • "this is what Jane would do"
  • "You are Jane, this is what you do" (user as research inventory, see Dervin paper - bad thing)
  • collaborating over time to develop a rich understanding of the roles and information needs of user/designers of the system

• We solicit documents/input from our community via the personas....community understands that they should be trying to satisfy the persona's information needs

• We need to go with the angle of working on a project that is significant but isn't very time constrained.

• Finally got it!....I think I should be searching for "navigation and personas".....

• I wonder, when Hilary said "interview Rob and I" was she talking about a qualitative data collection and analysis on interaction design on TWiki? If so, I think it'll be prudent to interview everyone that has used it to date (used our TWiki). If we cant do it in person, we can give them a questionnaire to fill out. I remember Anne saying something like "it wasn't intuitive that the triangles in the navigation bar on the left, meant that there were subwebs"...and thats partly whats driving Hilary to make a third column on the right with the webs and subwebs all spelt out (not hidden)...but what would we call this paper?

• We really do use personas differently and I think most "academic" projects use them differently compared to "business projects". Pruitt and Grudin(1) talk about story boards, websites, physical objects, marketing tools, posters, personnel (including 5000 users that typify the persona) etc being dedicated to a persona. In most academic projects, I don't think there is enough money to use personas this way. In the NotiFly? project, the designers were co-located, but they used a repository for sharing and consolidating their personas and for feedback(check this out again ifi!)....But what happens when the designers are in different locations? and are not all working 100% on the project (i.e its a side project for most of the participants)? I think thats one of the unique things about our project.

• So, the scale of the project, resources dedicated to the project, the location of participants, the amount of time participant have to work on the project etc are key points we should explore in our paper

• Maybe discussing how we created our personas is important. We didn't do any user study. We gathered people and wrote up stories. And we're hoping the community ultimately validates the personas we created....we've already been receiving feedback from participants. I think we need to edit the TA personas and elicit more feedback from people like Rosta Farzan.

persona papers and their contribution to this discussion:

• Personas: Practice and Theory (Pruitt & Grudin)
  • Two practical use of personas; a short and a long term project for Windows. Personas were useful as a communication tool for different teams including designers, VP, tech writers, programmers, testers, marketers etc. It helped in prioritizing features and were useful when arguing for resources etc. "Personas help focus attention on a specific target. This is really about creating personas and using them. "Product development is more challenging for participatory design"...I think this is really true. Maybe we can leverage the fact that we're not in a "business" setting to do more participatory design. Says to look at Grudin&Pruitt for this discussion.

• A latent semantic analysis methodology for identification and creation of personas (Miaskiewicz, Sumner, Kozar)
  • Introduces LSA to help with tighter coupling between user research data and persona creation. Less subjectivity and less need for "highly specialized personnel" while creating personas. Cited Sinha, who's also interested in better coupling between the user research data and the created persona. Don't think its really useful for our discussion.

• Personas in Action: Ethnography in an Interaction Design Team (Blomquist & Arvola)
  • "The personas never really became a natural part of the project". I see the same thing going on in our project. I'm supposed to be working on this most of the time and I can hardly remember the names of the personas let alone their xteristics. I think we really need to do a better job of integrating our personas into our workspace and into the project, so that anyone that comes into the project, becomes aware of our "neighbors" (the personas). "personas never became an integrated part of the design process due to the lack of know-how and the fact the team members never felt at home with personas an Goal-directed design...For a method to work properly it must however be tweaked to fit the designers that utilise it, and they must get the opportunity to integrate the new methods and new techniques into their professional toolbox that they know and regard as their own".

• Personas, Participatory design and product development: An infrastructure for Engagement (Grudin & Pruitt)
  • Pre-other-Grudin&Pruitt...Basically the same thing as the other paper. How personas can be applied in a software development company. Its hard to narrow it down to specific personas. Top level management has to be committed to the technique. Team needs to be taught how to use this technique. I think the feature-persona weighted priority matrix is innovative. "this feature hurts the persona", "the persona doesn't care about this feature", "this feature provides some value to the persona", "the persona loves this feature"...from -1 to +2. Many reasons why using personas is good.

• Personas is not Applicable: Local Remedies Interpreted in a Wider Context (Ronkko, Kilander, Dittrich)
  • "In a mass-market product development effort, market and competition-related issues; launching new versions and products at regular intervals and at the advertised time influence the product requirements and drive the product development,rather than any concept of what the user needs. Trying to sell the "wow" factor. Telecomms produces artefacts with potential usability, not the other way around. ID experts were supposed to make the technology usable.". Nobody is willing to identify typical users for a mass-market product, so you don't lose an unidentified group by not marketing to them. Is a development persona different from a marketing persona? I don't think so. I think a persona's description, should include his/her needs and wants. You can make sure the product satisfies the needs and wants in that order. Marketing and sales can then hype the satisfied want, while also reiterating that the needs are being met. There were different clients and different levels of client in this project. It was really hard to pinpoint the personas that the product was being developed for. Instead, market pressures and "wow" factor finally exhibited their "pattern of dominance" and became the explicit driving force behind the project. It is "the interaction between different interests and actors within telecommunications that hinder the application of a PD method.". "Social and political issues that influence the design an development methodology - and therefore the use-quality of the software - are far removed from the context of use". Big question being answered was, "what stops a PD method from being implemented". The answer wasn't the IDs, developers, M&S but rather, clients, licentiates, service providers, magazine reviewers and their inter-relations"

• Persona Development for Information Rich Domains (Rashmi Sinha)
  • Advocates for tighter coupling (and less subjectivity) between research data and created persona. Don't think its relevant to our discussion either.

• Application of personas in User interface design for Educational software (Ursula Dantin)
  • Uses persona "in combination with Nielsen usability heuristics" to evaluate the UID for two educational software. Question was, if personas were used in the original design, would the software packages have had different UIDs? The answer is yes. So she recommends the use of personas in a SD project and concludes that "even after implementation, personas can be a valuable tool to assess usability adn pinpoint areas for improvement"

• An empirical study demonstrating how different design constraints, project organization and contexts limited the utility of personas (Kari Ronkko)

• http://www.sics.se/humle/projects/persona/web/ (Kristina Hook)
  • I think the agents Agneta&Frida are kind of how I see us using personas. i.e using personas for navigation in addition to using them for interaction design

• Communication Functions and the Adaptation of Design Representations in Interdisciplinary Teams (David Hendry)
  • If you read "design representations" as "personas" while reading this paper, you'll see why I think it'll be important to this discussion. But, I've only glanced through it. I need to do more indepth reading.
  • Personas can be used for "conscripting participants", "co-ordinating", "framing(establishing a common ground)", "persuading" and "recording" (page 3, Table 1))
  • "the use of design representations is subject to adaptive pressure originating in the communication demands of an interdisciplinary[OR non co-located] team" (at the beginning we didn't need personas to explain to our team, what we were doing, but as time went on, and we didn't update them regularly on what we were working on, the personas (seeing how they've developed, how their information needs are being satisfied etc) became a way to show our PD team our progress. But Isn't this the way other teams do it? They use personas to resolve conflicts in design decisions....hmmm....I think I'm starting to see how they're different

• Probing an Agile Usability Process (Wolkerstorfer et al)
  • XP meets UCD...."extreme personas".....might not be really related to this work. But we could always use this in some other work.

• Design Principles for the Information Architecture of a SMET Education Digital Library (Dong & Agogino)
  • really, really good paper. Talks about creating a SMET DL from the constructivist view of learning. Navigation should be structured so that it guides people with low ability and allows people with high ability to be more exploratory.....

• NotiFly: Enhancing Design through Claims-Based Personas and Knowledge Reuse (Belcher et al)
  • The personas are part of the interface design in this flight notification system. A user chooses which persona most embodies how he/she wants to interact with the system and notifications are sent to the user based on the chosen persona and some other settings. In this case, the personas were not so fledged out (i.e male/female etc) but instead were represented by their personality and needs (busy-body, relaxer, scientist, manager, mechanic). I think this is very similar to how we want to use personas. However, we're doing full fledged personas(and I've expressed my worry about this in my sentence on "this is what Jane does" and "you are Jane, this is what you do". On a good note, we don't constrain our users. We allow them to choose a path of a persona but they can also decide to browse through another persona's path. Perhaps after doing this, they'll realize they should really stick to one persona or they might bridge personas (bookmark resources from each persona that is relevant to their specific situation). In this case then, those bookmarks/resources could be unindentified boundary artifacts and we should ensure both personas have access to the bookmarks/resources or we could be looking at a whole new persona that we missed.

• Scenarios in user-centered design - Setting the stage for reflection and action (Bodker, S)

-- IfiOkoye - 23 Jun 2008