Persona - an overview (Extract from the paper The User as a personality. Using Personas as a tool for design. Position paper for the course workshop "Theoretical perspectives in Human-Computer Interaction" at IPLab, KTH, September 3, 2002) Stefan Blomkvist Department of Information Technology, Human-Computer Interaction, Uppsala Universitet stefanb@hci.uu.se Introduction A persona is a model of a user that focuses on the individual's goals when using an artefact. The model has a specific purpose as a tool for software and product design. The persona model resembles classical user profiles, but with some important distinctions. It is an archetypical representation of real or potential users. It's not a description of a real, single user or an average user. The persona represents patterns of users' behaviour, goals and motives, compiled in a fictional description of a single individual. It also contains made-up personal details, in order to make the persona more "tangible and alive" for the development team. The idea of personas originated from Alan Cooper, an interaction designer and consultant. It's a part of an approach to software design called Goal-directed design. I refer to it as an approach or idea, because it's not a theory about users or interaction, neither is it a complete process for software development. Cooper has introduced the ideas about personas and goal-directed design in the book The inmates are running the asylum (Cooper 1999) and in articles (Cooper 1996). In addition, goal-directed design is promoted through Coopers consulting firm, so he has a commercial interest in it as well. Purpose of the paper Cooper's book and the idea of personas has been discussed to a certain degree and are often mentioned briefly in HCI courses, but has not really made much impact in the academic HCI community. Only a few articles mention it, e.g. Jettmar & Nass (2002) and Muller & Carey (2002). As the knowledge about personas isn't widespread, I believe there are reasons to take a closer look at these ideas. Personas and goal-directed design The word persona' illustrates one of the important characteristics of Cooper's concept - that a model of a user also should have a bit of personality - a life-like character driven by personal motives. But why should users' personality be important? According to Cooper (1999), it's a solution to a common problem in the design process. Concepts as "user", "designed for the user" and "user- 1 The word persona is derived from the Latin persona, referring to the masks worn by actors in ancient theatres. Cooper uses the terms persona and archetype, which also are common in Jungian psychology. But in this case, a persona is not really near Jung's definition. In Jungian psychology, a persona is the personality that an individual projects to others, as differentiated from the authentic self. Cooper doesn't refer to Jung or ancient theatres. However, in his meaning of persona, he is somewhat inspired by the traditional usage of the term
2 Persona - an overview Stefan Blomkvist, Dept. of IT/HCI, Uppsala Universitet friendly"