Forum Two - Personas

Title: The secret life of a persona: When the personal becomes private

Authors: Elina Eriksson, Henrik Artman, and Anna Swartling

To conclude, personas in relation to user centered design and HCI can be broken down into some of the following observations. First of all, personas are advantageous and efficient especially in instances where a scarcity exists in availability of time, information or people (Eriksson, Artman, & Swartling, 2013).The method is also a possible remedy whether actual users are not known or need to be anonymous. For example, the approach in the paper has been used in systems security works well as a portrait for hacker communities or system attackers.  Another area where personas are used is in industrial settings in which high dissemination risk of information that is critical to business exists.

Personas could also be viewed from a user centered design perspective (Eriksson, Artman, & Swartling, 2013).  For example, they may alienate emancipatory design aspects or stereotype users to a higher degree.  However, there was no possibility presented to suggest a more traditional UCD (User Centered Design) where a meeting took place for a design to be conducted between prospective users and developers.  The persona method in this case helped users influence system design by getting their voices heard.

Equally important, another major contributing factor was the importance of secrecy transformation into a resource (Eriksson, Artman, & Swartling, 2013).  Thus, personality subtleties had to be incorporated in professional descriptions and the persona goals through small as well as important social markers.  The omission of details also proved to be a mechanism from which an organization can reorganize a persona.

References

Eriksson, E., Artman, H., & Swartling, A. (2013). The secret life of a persona: When the personal becomes private. SIGCHI (pp. 2677-2686). Paris: ACM.