A Template for Design Personas: Analysis of 47 Persona Descriptions from Danish Industries and Organizations

Application Of The Persona Method

The personas method was introduced in the late 1990s within the IT sector and used in IT systems development. A persona is a description of a fictitious user constructed from different categories of field data - questionnaires, user interviews, observations, probes, and/or internal discussions. As the description is of a fictitious user, similar to existing persons, there is a common understanding in the literature that the persona has a name and often a photo accompanies the description in order to make the description as vivid as possible (Long, 2009). As the descriptions are to be used for design purposes they are not more than 1-2 pages long with several subsections. Personas are supposed to encourage a focus on the end-users in the design process. Here the persona is used both to create design solutions and discuss design ideas.

Since the late 1990s the method has become known worldwide and has spread to other areas outside IT, such as marketing, communication, and product development. Today the term “persona” covers a wide range of understandings of how to portray a (fictional) user, from capturing a project team’s pre-understandings of the users (Normann, 2006), to descriptions of specific user types based on large sets of data, analyzed to reveal the differences among the present and future users (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). Personas are used for different activities ranging from a designer who uses the persona to imagine the end-user’s design preferences and needs, to marketing investigating how to address users.