Personas in action: ethnography in an interaction design team
Abstract
Alan Cooper's view on interaction design is both appealing and provoking since it avoids problems of involving users by simply excluding them. The users are instead represented by an archetype of a user, called persona. This paper reports a twelve-week participant observation in an interaction design team with the purpose of learning what really goes on in a design team when they implement personas in their process. On the surface it seemed like they used personas, but our analysis show how they had difficulties in using them and encountered problems when trying to imagine the user. We furthermore describe and discuss how the design team tried to involve users in order to compensate for their problems. It is concluded that it is not enough for the design team, and particularly not for the interaction designers, to have the know-how of using the method. They also have to integrate it with existing knowledge and practices in order to feel at home with it and use it efficiently.
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When looking at practical issues reported in other fields, it appears relevant that Personas are introduced from the beginning, and if team members are not familiar with this methodology, they may have little trust in its benefits.
“When looking at practical issues reported in other fields, it appears relevant that Personas are introduced from the beginning, and if team members are not familiar with this methodology, they may have little trust in its benefits (Blomquist and Arvola, 2002).”
From Using Personas in the development of eHealth interventions for chronic pain: A scoping review and narrative synthesis (2023) · cites this paper as Blomquist and Arvola, 2002
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How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas?
Matthews, T., Judge, T., & Whittaker, S. (2012) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2207676.2208573 · Cited by 245 · see citing works
Personas is applicable: a study on the use of personas in Denmark
Nielsen, L., & Storgaard Hansen, K. (2014) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2556288.2557080 · Cited by 140 · see citing works
Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas from Online Social Media Data
An, J., Kwak, H., Jung, S., Salminen, J., Admad, M., & Jansen, B. (2018) · ACM Transactions on the Web · doi:10.1145/3265986 · Cited by 104 · see citing works
Use Cases for Design Personas: A Systematic Review and New Frontiers
Salminen, J., Wenyun Guan, K., Jung, S.-G., & Jansen, B. (2022) · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3491102.3517589 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Bartels, S. L., Taygar, A. S., Johnsson, S. I., Petersson, S., Flink, I., Boersma, K., McCracken, L. M., & Wicksell, R. K. (2023) · Internet Interventions · doi:10.1016/j.invent.2023.100619 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Instilling Knowledge Claims of Personas from 346 Research Articles
Salminen, J., Jung, S.-G., Chhirang, K., & Jansen, B. (2021) · Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3411763.3451619 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
- Authors
- Blomquist, Å., & Arvola, M.
- Affiliations
- Swedish National Tax Board SE-117 94 Solna, Sweden
- Linköping University (SE)
- ORCID
- Arvola, Mattias
- Venue
- Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2002-10-19
- Pages
- 197-200
- OpenAlex
- W2150300796
- Cited by
- 226
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 12 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 2.04
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Persona Design and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- personas, interaction design, design teams, user participation, user archetypes, design process, user representation, participant observation
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