Personas - novel ways, new complications

Speaker:
Lene Nielsen, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract:
This year it is 20 years since Alan Cooper coined the method of user profiles as personas. Over the years the persona method has been applied to many different domains and in many different formats. Lene Nielsen will present three such new areas that she has been researching in recent years: Automated persona generation - you can generate persona descriptions from large amount of quantitative data, but is it a good idea? International personas – most often personas has been applied on small samples of users without considerations on cultural differences, what happens when companies have a global audience? How can they be represented? And what are the obstacles in the method? Personas in agile methods – integration UX in agile development has proven to be difficult, but maybe personas is the solution? This part reports from 3 workshops in large corporations. The three areas presented represents data collection, application and systems development and all have their pros and cons when it comes to application.

Biography:
Lene Nielsen is associate professor at the Department of Business IT, at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is Denmark’s leading expert in the persona method and has a PhD in personas and scenarios. Through her research and practical experiences has developed her own approach to the method – 10 Steps to Personas. Lene Nielsen has published more than 70 papers on personas and has recently published the second edition of her book on personas “Personas – user focused design.”

Host: Dr. Monica Landoni