An Empirical Study Demonstrating How Different Design Constraints, Project Organization and Contexts Limited the Utility of Personas

Rönkkö, Kari

doi:10.1109/hicss.2005.85

Cited by 39 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Ultimately, "personas never became an integrated part of the design process, due to the lack of know-how and the fact that the team members never felt at home with personas." An additional study that explored how personas function in three separate sites found that organizational contexts "limited the utility of the personas technique," with one site marginalizing personas, another using personas for political buy-in, and the third questioning whether personas were more valuable than direct data from end-users [17].…”

Section: Previous Empircal Research On Personasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personas and decision making in the design process

Friess

2012

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

120

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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 decisionmaking 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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Section: Previous Empircal Research On Personasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personas and decision making in the design process

Friess

2012

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In a utility of persona study by Rönkkö [22], interaction designers preferred to maintain end user dependencies through the use of mock-ups elaborated together with the users. His work shows that personas are not very useful if end users are within reach.…”

Section: Persona and Character In Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using dramaturgical methods to gain more dynamic user understanding in user-centered design

Kantola

Tiitta

Mehto

et al. 2007

Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity &Amp; Cognition - C&C '07

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In this paper we introduce the method of dramaturgical reading, which was originally a method of producing different crystallized and associative theatrical and graphical presentations of a role character in a drama context. We transfer dramaturgical reading into the field of user-centered design in order to understand, analyze and represent usercentered material. We compare a persona created with dramaturgical reading to a user profile and persona. We state that adapting a role character as an embodied and concrete user description in user-centered design improves the designers' ability to empathize and understand the users, thus improving the results of the design process. We believe personas must be enabled to "come to life" and allowed to develop in the minds of the designers using them. The dramaturgical method is one way of accomplishing this.

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“…This tends to result in (b) persona projects being expensive, in the range of tens of thousands of American dollars (Marsden & Haag 2016;Miaskiewicz, Sumner & Kozar 2008). Consequently, as Rönkkö (2005) found, the amount of effort may lead to questioning the return on investment of persona projects. Moreover, the high cost of persona creation tends to exclude them from the reach of small businesses and startups, as pointed out by .…”

Section: Use Of Personasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the resulting personas may suffer from bias when the interviewed subjects are chosen based on availability rather than representativeness of the entire customer base. Overall, (c) personas risk inheriting organizational tensions and individual biases, including political and strategic ambitions of their creators (Hill et al 2017;Massanari 2010;Rönkkö 2005). Vincent andBlandford (2014, p. 1098) argue that "[persona creation] has been adapted, depending on what people want to accomplish and why."…”

Section: Use Of Personasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics

Salminen¹,

Jansen²,

An³

et al. 2018

Pers Stud

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In this critique, we conceptually examine the use of personas in an age of availability of large-scale online analytics data. Based on the criticism and benefits outlined in prior work, we formulate the major arguments for and against the use of personas, analyze these arguments, and demonstrate areas for the productive employment of personas by leveraging digital analytics data in their creation. From our review of the prior literature and the given availability of online customer data, our key tenet is that personas are located between aggregated and individual statistics. At their best, personas capture the coverage of the customer base attributed to aggregated data representations while retaining the interpretability of individual-level analytics. Persona creation benefits from both novel computational techniques and data sources. To demonstrate this, we propose and implement automatically generated personas primarily based on quantitative data. We also review key persona validation issues and examine how these issues can be addressed with automated persona generation using real user data from online analytics platforms. Finally, we outline areas of future research in the persona domain within the field of digital marketing and advertising. Overall, to survive in the rapidly developing marketing industry and online customer analytics, personas must evolve by adopting new practices. There are implications for this evolution of personas in a variety of domains, including design, content creation, and digital marketing.

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An Empirical Study Demonstrating How Different Design Constraints, Project Organization and Contexts Limited the Utility of Personas

Cited by 39 publications

References 8 publications

Personas and decision making in the design process

Personas and decision making in the design process

Using dramaturgical methods to gain more dynamic user understanding in user-centered design

Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics

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