Jane Billestrup

Going global with personas

The persona method is widely used and commonly described both in scientific literature and in case-based blogs. Most often the descriptions point to a local context with local user groups and it is difficult to find writings on use of the method in an international context and in globally distributed teams. This paper reports from a qualitative study conducted in 2012/13 within 13 Danish companies and points to how design teams apply several different strategies when end-users are distributed worldwide. Moreover it shows how the designers value the strength of the method to provide common grounds for the team, especially for team distributed across countries.

A Template for Design Personas: Analysis of 47 Persona Descriptions from Danish Industries and Organizations

The persona method is gaining widespread use and support. Many researchers have reported from single cases and from novel domains on how they have used the method. However, the way companies and design groups describe personas has not been the focus of attention. This paper analyses 47 descriptions from 13 companies and compares these to an analysis of recommendations from 11 templates from literature. Furthermore, 28 interviews with Danish practitioners with experience in using personas are analyzed for content on persona descriptions. The study finds that a Danish persona style has developed that is different from the recommendations in the lack of marketing and business related information and the absence of goals as differentiator for personas. Furthermore, the inspiration and knowledge on personas originates from co-workers and seminars and not much from literature. This indicates that the community of practice influences the persona style.

Usability problems found across public self-service applications and self-service providers

This paper presents a study of similarities of usability problems, found across nine public Danish self-service applications from six self-service areas by five different self-service providers. The study found that three types of usability problems were presents across applications and self-service providers. These results were compared to Jacob Nielsens ten usability heuristics.

Usability Problems Experienced by Different Groups of Skilled Internet Users: Gender, Age, and Background

Finding the right test persons to represent the target user group, when conducting a usability evaluation is considered essential by the HCI research community. This paper explores data from a usability evaluation with 41 participants with high IT skills, to examine if age, gender, and job function or educational background, has an impact on the amount and types of usability problems experienced by the users. All usability problems were analysed and categorised through closed coding, to group the test persons differently in relation to gender, age, and job function or educational background. The study found that the usability problems experienced across gender, age group and job function or educational background, are approximately the same. This indicates that the usual characteristics of test persons, might not be as important, and opens up for further research in regards to, if users with different skill levels, in regards to internet usage, might be more applicable.

Creating and Using Personas in Software Development: Experiences from Practice

Personas is a technique that supports designing and engineering interactive systems with the focus on the end-users. This paper reports from a case study, where we interviewed four software developers about their usage of personas in software development practice. The purpose of was to identify the practices of personas development in the software development industry. How the respondents perceive personas and its use does not always correlate with what is described as best practice in the literature. We found that practitioners are not using personas as stated in the literature but are developing their own practices both in regards to when and how personas are created.