Personas: New Data, New Trends!

A CHI 2022 Course

Lene Nielsen

IT University Copenhagen, lene@itu.dk

Jim Jansen

Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, bjansen@hbku.edu.qa

Joni Salminen

Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, jsalminen@hbku.edu.qa

José Abdelnour Nocera 

University of West London and ITI/Larsys, Jose.Abdelnour-Nocera@uwl.ac.uk

Soon-gyo Jung

Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, sjung@hbku.edu.qa

COURSE SUMMARY

Personas has evolved since Alan Cooper coined the term in 1999, moving into new domains, new ways of collecting data, and with novel ways of presenting the persona profiles. From the beginning, personas was linked to software design, expressing the need for empathy with end-users. This is still the case today, but we want to show how this is executed in different domains, not only in software, and how different forms of presentation relate to empathy. Thus, the persona course investigates the relationship between data collection, the representation of data as persona profiles, and empathy.

Additional Keywords and Phrases: personas, quantitative data, qualitative data, empathy

1     Benefits

Do you consider developing personas and do you not know how to get data, what data is appropriate, and have you considered why persona descriptions look similar, then this course is for you – whether you are a researcher or a professional. The teachers are all experts on personas with both practical and theoretical experiences with the method.

The participants will get: 

• an introduction to personas based on quantitative data, how personas can represent the quantitative data as well as the pros and cons of quantitative data
• an introduction to personas based on qualitative data, how personas can represent the qualitative data as well as the pros and cons of qualitative data
• inspiration to new ways of representing personas, by experimenting with different forms of persona descriptions and work with how they can create empathy

2     Intended Audience 

The intended audience are researchers and professionals who are familiar with personas and who what to dive deeper into the method. We will not introduce personas, so a brief knowledge of the method is needed, but not necessarily experiences from use.

3     Content

The purpose of the course is to assess the latest trends within personas. To; 1) review the present state-of-the-art of methods for data and 2) discuss new forms of interfaces/methods to present the personas. In particular, to discuss how the different data and presentation forms can bring value to the use of the method.

• The course seeks to investigate rather than answer the following questions:
• How do you use quantitative data for personas?
• How do you use qualitative data for personas?
• Does the type of data influence the interface and presentation of personas?
• What is the best way to present quantitative and qualitative personas?
• Is there a relation between designers’ conception of end-users and persona creation?
• What is the best way to create empathy? 

The course invites participants to learn, discuss and explore persona experiences. Participants from industry are particularly welcome. The course layout will be a mix of presentations from organisers, experiments, and participants discussions.

3.1         Course Structure

Overall, the course is planned to have a one-day duration of presentations, experiments, and plenary discussions. The organizers will contribute with presentations, which will pose challenges and act as starters to sessions. 

We aim for at least 8 and a maximum of 25 participants to ensure a course atmosphere and informal style, where all have a chance to share viewpoints and engage in discussions.

We will run the course on-side.

Unit	Duration	Topic
1	75 min	Welcome, participant presentationorganiser presentation: A focus on data
2	75 min	Organiser presentation: Different persona presentations and empathy
3	75 min	Experiments: new ways of presenting personas
4	75 min	Plenary session and closing remarks

Table 1. Course layout. The total duration (without breaks) is estimated to 5 hours

4     Practical work

The participants can bring own personas to work on or they will be handed persona description they will work on. 

5     Instructor background: 

Dr. Lene Nielsen, is Associate Professor at IT University Copenhagen, department of Business IT. Her main research and teaching are in user experience research, in particular personas. Lene Nielsen has worked as a usability and persona consultant. She is a member of the ISDI (Information Systems and Digital Innovation) research group. She has written Personas – User Focused design and numerous scientific articles on personas as well as been a consultant for many Danish companies and organisations.

Dr. Jim Jansen current research project concerns personas. Dr. Jansen has authored or co-authored 300 or so research publications, with articles appearing in a multi-disciplinary and extremely wide range of journals and conferences. He is author of the book, Understanding Sponsored Search: A Coverage of the Core Elements of Keyword Advertising (Cambridge University Press), author of the book Understanding User – Web Interactions Via Web Analytics, co-author of the book, Web Search: Public Searching of the Web, and co-editor of the book Handbook of Research on Weblog Analysis. Dr. Jansen is a member of the ACM’s Distinguished Speaker Program (DSP). He has performed several consulting and expert witnessing cases.

Dr. Joni Salminen works as a Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Turku School of Economics at the University of Turku. Dr. Salminen has co-authored a book on data-driven personas, and his current research interests include data-driven personas, persona analytics, interactive persona systems, and customer segmentation.

Prof. Jose Abdelnour-Nocera is Professor of Sociotechnical Design at the University of West London. His interests lie in the role of cultural diversity in the design of people-centred systems and in software development teams. In pursuing these interests, he has been involved as researcher and consultant in several projects in the UK and overseas in the domains of international development, mhealth, enterprise resource planning systems, service design and higher education. Dr. Abdelnour-Nocera gained an MSc in Social Psychology from Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela and a PhD in Computing from The Open University, UK.

Soon-gyo Jung is currently a software engineer at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar. He has been working on data analytics/data-driven/data-intensive systems by applying research-oriented software engineering (Computer Science, Data Science & Analytics) skills. He also does jobs of a software architect, full-stack web developer, data architect, and data engineer. He received the B.E. degree in computer software from the Kwangwoon University, Seoul, Korea, in 2014, and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea, in 2016.