Academic papers on the use of personas in design?

Pete,

The only ones that I know of come out of Microsoft Research.

http://tinyurl.com/4gq3o

http://tinyurl.com/4kefk

JS

>
> Everyone,
>
> I've been looking for some academic literature on the use of
> personas
> in the design process, and it seems rather thin on the
> ground, to say
> the least.

You may want to include a search on "audience composite" and "audience
segment composite", which is one of the terms used in the advertising
community around San Francisco in the mid-80s (about 5 or 10 years
before Cooper started using the idea to communicate to SF advertising
firms) for the exact same thing as Persona. They had a lot of
research supporting their use of the practice.

I ran across some very old notes from college that discussed this
concept after witnessing the products first-hand in the ad firms.

I hope this helps in some way.

All the best,
Thomas

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 17:22:01 +0000, Peter Bagnall
<pete at surfaceeffect.com> wrote:
> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]
>
> Everyone,
>
> I've been looking for some academic literature on the use of personas
> in the design process, and it seems rather thin on the ground, to say
> the least. If anyone knows of any papers/journal articles regarding
> personas I'd be very grateful. From what I've found most of the
> material being produced is in the form of training courses for
> designers!
>
> Cheers
> --Pete
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
> One of the great attractions of patriotism it fulfils our worst wishes.
> In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and
> cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are
> profoundly virtuous.
> Aldous Huxley
>
> Peter Bagnall - http://people.surfaceeffect.com/pete/

Kristoffer Åberg wrote:

> Try some of these:
> Engaging Personas and Narrative Scenarios
> Nielsen, L. (2004). Dept of Informatics PhD Series 17
> http://web.cbs.dk/staff/lene/Engaging%20personas%20narrative%20scenarios.pdf

Thanks Kristoffer for this link. I had never seen this before.

What a coincidence it is that Peter Bagnall started this thread, while
the same kind of thouhgts was criss-crossing my mind. In fact I am in
the middle of a design session where I am leading Task Analysis and
facilitating folks to create Personas. Today was the day when we
actually dived into Personas. I would love to share some moments here.
I also have some discussion points and questions. Please respond --

We all agreed that we would take the Persona's way to enter in the
realm of Design. But there are some obvious reasons that the group
can't relate with the benefits of Persona. The reason why they
couldn't see the any direct relation this early is -- "we have not
found any direct link between user's motivation to use the system with
the ethnographic data we collected". That was one surprising
revelation. Any comments, or similar experiences?

We decided about Personas, and discussed who should (or shouldn't) be
the Key persona. We also did some work as a team deciding about their
system level preferences, tasks, accesses to features and some of
their tasks/goals/motivations outside system. We could not complete
the job of putting any face/name to these Personas, but what followed
later was very interesting.

I, along with my boss (who is also a marketing genius) in the act of
walking through these Personas, started drawing cartoons and
caricatures for some of these personas. Pardon me for accepting this,
but you can imagine it was a moment when we were laughing our guts out
about these personas. I don't know what some of the perfectionists may
think, but I was wondering why associating personas with a fictional
character, when a comic character can tell the story so interestingly?
Is there anything that I should consider?

Thoughts?

Pradyot Rai