Personas, people and participation–challenges from the trenches of local government Susanne Bødker Department of Computer Science Aarhus University
[email protected]
Ellen Christiansen, Tom Nyvang, Pär-Ola Zander Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University ech, nyvang,
[email protected] the years, there has been an overlap with the development of persona methodology, in continuation of Grudin’s discussions of the role of participatory design in product development (Grudin & Pruitt, 2002). The challenges, according to Grudin & Pruitt, for user participation in large development organizations are that actual users are difficult to identify and distant. Hard to identify, not so much because they are not out there. Actually they are, in abundance, but because organizational matters prevent collaboration and the making of an actual promise to any future users. By 'distant', Grudin & Pruitt seem to talk about users with whom the development organization has, or wants to have, an arm’s length relationship, rather than users for whom a project is developed directly. The personas are the solution to these challenges, they claim.
ABSTRACT
In the early days of digital technology development, design was done ‘for’, ‘with’ or ‘by’ the users based on the assumption that users were real people. Today ‘users’ have become a component in mass-market production and are seen as ‘customers’, rather than people. Still designers need to address use, and personas have been introduced for this purpose. The paper uses research on user participation and research-based personas from the eGov+ project to discuss whether personas help designers engage with users. In this project, design was carried out in the domain of municipal services through involvement of clerks, management and citizens from three different municipalities. Through four cases we discuss if applying personas in participatory design settings is productive to designers’ understanding of users’ use situations. Does deployment of personas bring designers closer to the actual use situation? In which ways do personas help design for, with or by the users? Do personas support participatory design?
The persona-discussions of this paper are reflections upon a research project, which has been addressing Web 2.0 technologies for improving cooperation and communication in eGovernment. This project included four cases of participatory design in three major Danish municipalities. Our focus in this paper is on the role of the users and how they were identified and embodied in four design case studies, each of which was carried out in collaboration with a particular municipal office in one of the municipalities. The cases were exploring the design and introduction of research-based, innovative web-based technologies in the particular setting.
Author Keywords
Personas, participation, design, eGovernment ACM Classification Keywords
D2.10 Design, Methodologies. INTRODUCTION
In the 1980’s, conceptualizing ‘the user’ became an issue in information systems design and researchers and developers talked about ‘for’, ‘with’ or ‘by’ users, based on the assumption that ‘users’ were real, living people (Briefs et al., 1982). Today, ‘users’ are often reduced to a component in the mass-market production, and human beings are ‘customers’, ‘clients’ or ‘stakeholders’. Still designers need to address use. Therefore, personas have been suggested to keep the designers’ minds to the complexity of the actual use situation (see also Freiss, 2012; Matthews et al., 2012).
In our attempts to identify and embody users in these design processes, the use of personas has been particularly relevant and challenging, since personas have been promoted heavily in the Danish municipal design context, as we return to in detail later. Where do personas come from?
Personas for use in design are usually attributed to Cooper (Grudin & Pruit, 2002; Freiss 2012, Matthews et al. 2012), who defines personas as follows:
With our background in the participatory design tradition, we have worked over the years to develop the methods of communication between designers and users applying e.g. scenarios to bring use situations closer to designers, and seed technology ideas in communities of users (Bødker, 1987; Bødker & Christiansen, 1995; 1997; 2004). Over
“Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. Although they are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision. Actually, we don't so much “make up” our personas as discover them as a byproduct of the investigation process. We do, however, make up their names and personal details.” (Cooper, 2004, p. 85)
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Cooper argued that designing for personas would help the designers see beyond their own assumptions because the personas represent real people, real users with real goals, while it is unclear where the data to ground this came from (Friess, 2012). Grudin & Pruitt (2002) developed
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the concept further and argued that personas might restore the user focus in large product development organizations–a user focus that was lost because large groups of developers producing for a mass-marked had great difficulty in finding representative user participants for a participatory design process (Grudin, 1990; Grudin, 1993). According to Grudin & Pruitt (2002), personas intend to engage designers, address social and political matters in addition to more traditional user-centered design concerns, and hold on to the complexity of use. It is important that personas are anchored in empirical data. According to Grudin & Pruitt’s experience, personas are useful in a long-term relationship with developers, quite like characters in somebody’s favorite TV series, where neither caricatures nor any other added boldness is needed (even though the characters are NOT real human beings). In addition to this sort of emphatic and deep relationship, Grudin & Pruitt point out that personas can allow for an understanding of the values, fears, etc., of the users. These additions have later been elaborated and substantiated in Pruitt and Adlin (2006).
say that borger.dk is the flagship of eGovernment in Denmark, in a country that prides itself with being on the leading edge of digital governance. The 12 personas have been developed to portray traits of real citizens based on data from major quantitative studies, segmenting the entire population of the country according to preferred ways of communication with government and municipal offices and according to IT literacy. Differences in educational level, age and profession have also been taken into account when the 12 personas were created (borger.dk,2006, p. 7). Interestingly, there seems to be no focus on different citizen approaches to self-service as such in the data, only to very general citizen IT literacy. The approach of borger.dk, furthermore, appears slightly different from the one suggested by Grudin & Pruit (2002) in the overall approach to user participation. Where Grudin & Pruitt gave up active user participation when developing to a mass market, borger.dk does not abandon citizen participation because of the 12 personas (they are also referred to as model citizens). In fact the portal invites all users (designers as well as citizens) to submit views and opinions. At the same time, there is, however, no clear description of how citizen participation in a broader sense is to be combined with personas in the general process outlined.
Chang et al. (2008) took their starting point in the persona literature and in how practitioners “actually utilize” personas in their work. According to Chang et al., there has been an extensive debate among proponents of personas as to whether a persona can represent/reflect one user, or whether they are necessarily compilations and combinations of several users. Both of those approaches have problems: It is not necessarily a good idea to design for singular users on the one hand, and on the other, if features are freely combined by the designers, the persona may end up like a Frankenstein’s monster. Grudin & Pruit (2002) and Chang et al. (2008) criticized the original approach by Cooper, and in particular Copper’s own practice: Cooper would too easily give up on the relationship between the personas used in design, and the actual users/data, upon which the persona was built (see also Friess, 2012).
It is in this setting that the eGov+ project conducted its design-oriented research. THE CASE SETTING
The goal of the eGov+ research project was to explore social web approaches and Web 2.0 technologies for government services. The project was interdisciplinary and focused on management, design methods as well as novel web technology (see e.g. Borchorst et al., 2009; Borchorst & Bødker, 2011; Bohøj et al., 2010; 2011). In the project we worked with three municipalities on four cases, all discussed in this paper. The project involved three commercial companies which all had municipal government as their business area, and three municipalities, represented both by their IT development and implementation departments and by offices, which delivered front-line services to citizens. The role of the researchers was to address technologies and design methods in this boundary space where the interests of citizens met the municipalities, and where, at the same time, commercial and democratic interests met.
Grudin & Pruitt (2002) emphasized that personas are a means of communication within design projects, and that this communication should be multifaceted, and multimodal. Personas make explicit the assumptions that the project makes about its users. Personas and PD have an ambivalent relationship. Cooper seems agnostic to the idea of participatory design. Some researchers treat them as different methods, where PD is better for smaller projects and personas are strongest for large-scale projects (Grudin in Pruitt & Adlin, 2006, p. 661-662). Other authors combine the two (e.g. Norman in Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). Our contribution lies in a rich description of how, and with what results. With these general background considerations in mind, we turn to the specific setting.
Our research comprised observations, interviews, and workshops exploring the nature of current services (or lack thereof) combined with a design-oriented exploration of prospective novel designs. Prototypes served as concrete alternatives to current practice, as well as ways of probing the problem area (Bødker and Christiansen, 1997; 2004). As a means for analyzing the design space for the prototyping, we used scenarios and we tried various forms of personas and ways of embodying the users, as it is discussed in this paper.
Twelve personas
Borger.dk is a Danish national portal offering citizens access to public information and self-service. The portal does, however, also offer services to developers of online public information and services. Most prominently it offers a set of 12 personas and an accompanying text introducing the use of personas. It is no exaggeration to
One of the major challenges was to make the voices of the citizens heard in design processes together with caseworkers and other civil servants (Borchorst et al., 2009;
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Borchorst 2011; Bohøj et al., 2010; 2011). Our “traditional” participatory design thinking of making users’ voices heard through direct involvement clashed somewhat with the thinking of the municipal system (as described above), already in the habit of working with the 12 general personas as citizen-representatives.
revisited in this reflection process. Our approach for carrying out this sort of experience-based reflection is grounded in the specific needs, activities and methodological challenges of each of these cases, and confronts what happened in the cases with literature discussing the use of personas.
Meanwhile, although potentially having access to citizens in abundance (just like Microsoft potentially has), we found that citizens were not often active users of specific services for longer periods of time: At the one extreme rare events like moving from one place to another requires only brief encounters with the municipality while at negotiating parental leave may require parents to be in contact with authorities on and off for up to 9 years.
THE DESIGN CASES
In the following we go into further detail with the project experiences. It should be noted that as part of the research project, we never aimed for a complete product at the end of our design processes; rather we aimed for alternatives and ideas. Self service and public decision makers
In this case, the aim was to make citizen-users’ experience, attitudes and strategies inform designers and municipal decision makers in relation to design of selfservice solutions. The aim was to give citizens a voice in a literal sense, by collecting data on how citizens’ talk about the municipality’s service, and how they feel about the communication with the municipality in general.
In contrast to the citizens, the caseworkers were more classical users doing a regular day job with a selection of particular citizen services in continuous focus. While our design cases focused on both groups of users, the involvement of the evasive user was a particular challenge to the design cases. Furthermore, it was part of the research of the project to provide a richer understanding of citizen encounters with municipal services, and improve design methods, to be delivered to municipal service designers. Since borger.dk had already suggested that personas would be central in such a transfer of understanding, it was natural for the project to look towards personas as a possible way of supporting such design-oriented knowledge transfer. However, as soon as the project started to work with empirical user data, it became a concern that the 12 personas seemed distant from actual citizens, very general and difficult to activate in specific participatory design activity. Accordingly, we decided to step back from these 12 personas and take a deeper look at the understanding and embodiment of users in such municipal design projects.
In order to meet a broad variety of citizens we put up a small stall in the center square of a local shopping mall and invited citizens passing by to answer our questions in return for which they could enter a draw to win a Nintendo Wii. Four interviewers spent three full days and interviewed 67 citizens (10-30 minutes each) focusing on experience and attitudes. Furthermore, we engaged citizens in active reflection on how they would solve three specific self-service tasks: 1. What would you do if you were to move to a new address and should inform the municipality? 2. What would you do if you were to sign up your child for daycare? 3. What would you do if you were to add a new building to your house? The tasks all called for contact between citizen and municipality, and were selected based on two criteria: relationship to service domains that municipalities are (or have been) eager to transfer to self-service, and social event cycle, which most citizens have been in touch with. The interviews proved to be a feasible way to get a variety of personal experiences coloring the expectations of online self-service. In citizens’ experience the selfservice forms never fitted their individual case completely, whether on paper, or in the digital form. Many expressed some skepticism about the reliability and speed of self-service, whereas they had no preferences regarding communication channel, given that they provided the same level of qualities. To explore how to convey the richness behind these insights we aimed for a very lightweight type of citizen-user model. Instead of writing personas, as fictive characters and attributing different characteristics and attitudes, we shortcut the construction and went directly to presenting transcriptions of actual citizen statements like: “Well, what I did? I went up there, at the Boulevard office, and there you had to talk to hundred people before you found the right one–only to find out that, ok, nice, but
Research approach
This paper illustrates and discusses some of this work, which ultimately leads to a discussion of the role of (various forms of) personas vis-à-vis participation in design. Before we specifically discuss what was learned from the design cases, and how this message relates to personas, we call our own user embodiments ‘personas’ and return to a discussion of their relation to personas later. Some issues to be returned to in the cases: 1. How to reduce distance between users and designers? 2. How important is statistical representativity? 3. How do personas talk back in design? 4. The pros and cons of “real people” vs. model humans 5. Does it matter if users/personas are frequent/regular or not? This paper primarily presents a reflection on design. We have carried out a number of design cases as part of a larger research project, and we are now bringing together results and analyses from these cases in order to reflect upon the possibilities and problems of using personas in a design setting, where there are plenty of potential users, who are all mainly marginally and in short moments users of the technology under design. The design cases were documented through notes, audio, video and the design artifacts themselves, all of which is material that has been 93
you should go to the Skalborg office, because, apparently that is where I belong. I didn’t have a clue” (Young man) “I do not like sending an e-mail to them much, it can be misunderstood, and on the phone you may use the wrong tone of voice, so I prefer personal communication” (Young woman) “There is an English version, but it doesn’t have all the information. If you are looking for something specific, you need to go to the Danish webpage and get a translation” (English speaking couple from India) “Well, for instance regarding garbage collection, I get a notification on my mobile, that is great, and I have also recommended it to my sons (..) they tend to forget the garbage collection days” (senior citizen) The statements were printed on a set of cards, and used as prompting material in a workshop with representatives of the relevant stakeholders: Heads of citizen service in two large municipalities, and a software company.
mainly because the participants were reminded of the many kinds of citizens that they already were acquainted with from their everyday work. In this case, the statements served as reminders of users already known to the participants, rather than as introduction of new types of users or personas. The interviews at the mall demonstrated for the researchers that citizens were truly different in experience and expectation. Yet they were also similar and showed similar patterns of behavior and attitude across the people that were interviewed. We cannot claim that the study in this case represents all Danes or even all citizens in the city where we did the interviews. The statements presented to the stakeholders, however, represented real concerns and experiences. The stakeholders acknowledged this by taking seriously all utterances presented to them. No citizens were discarded as plainly stupid or in other ways too unique to pay specific attention to. This obviously presents a challenge to those researchers making the selection of utterances and ‘personas’ to be balance oddities and outliers with some form of representativeness. Experiences and attitudes of real people brought workshop participants closer to the citizens even though we didn’t go through the process of constructing full personas with photo, history, family and so on. Only the traits directly or in-directly mentioned in short statements were conveyed to the stakeholders in the workshop. It was our impression that the complexity of the real experiences played a role in convincing the participants that what they were dealing with was authentic and thus important to learn from. The kind of ‘persona’ statements used in this case talked back to workshop participants by representing real experiences with and attitudes towards existing designs. The aforementioned statement “Well, for instance regarding garbage collection…” was first evaluating an existing design (“I get a notification on my mobile, that is great”) and secondly talking about ways to communicate designs in practice (“and I have also recommended it to my sons”). This made stakeholders discuss how to use existing social networks to diffuse new self-service solutions and whether the motivation of a father seeking to help his sons could be found elsewhere and used to motivate competent self-service users who wanted to communicate the possibilities to other citizens. Although personas were not explicitly used in the case, the method has resemblances that shed light on personas and their alternatives. This case indicates it is relevant to include statements from different citizens, both current users and non-users. Since what is at stake here is development of the use of self-service, non-using citizens or citizens talking about a relation to non-using citizens are equally relevant.
This was an exploration of the potential of bringing citizen voices to the decision-makers' table. And a promising one indeed: Apparently the actual wording made the citizen service managers as well as the developer imagine a person speaking. A picture came to mind, and they argued with the person–imaginatively, while also speaking about “people like him/her”, this way obviously (and unfortunately) stereotyping. The bottom line for the workshop participants was, however, that they needed to deal with people with very few resources and a hostile attitude towards the citizen service–people, who are not covered or coming to mind through usual personadescriptions. Such 'despicable' citizens became inescapably present at the table, and in that respect part of the digitalization discussion. If personas are seen as a conduit for the knowledge about a certain user group, the statements acted as such a conduit that helped bring such knowledge to the foreground. Something, which we can call an ad-hoc ‘persona’, is created in the discussion (see Norman in Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). Although not a persona in Cooper's sense these statements had a similar purpose. They acted as a means for bringing knowledge about the users into design discussion, and were brought to the table by the designers when adequate. The designers, however had far less control over the format and what to filter out, than with regular personas. In this case (potential) designers/researchers left their offices to meet and talk to citizens in a shopping mall, hence shortening the distance between those selected few and the citizens they met. However, the question is whether the data brought back from the mall and represented in single statements reduced the distance between citizens and the stakeholders in the workshop? The statements reminded workshop participants that social dynamics and communication in families and other networks affects the way their services are used and diffused. They were also reminded that citizens often experience a distance between themselves and the public caseworkers–a distance that citizens actually put quite a lot of effort into bridging. In that respect the bare utterances seemed to bring the users into the workshop,
Citizen Service Offices
The citizen services case took physical citizen service offices as its focal point. Here, we collected data through observations of the activity in three citizen services offices (12-14 half-day observations on overlapping dates by five researchers), interviews with citizens (brief exit-
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interviews, carried out primarily by two researchers) and caseworkers (contextual/situated interviews carried out by all researchers as part of the observations). The observations were supported by observation schemes and the drawing of top-of-the-hour heat maps of cooperative activity in the municipal offices.
persona) would probably like this solution better than Ahmed.” Choosing a person that was a close as possible to themselves so as to avoid dealing with other perspectives, is evidently running against the rationale behind personas, and in parts a result of the fact that the students had not yet met real users, we suggest.
Moreover, we conducted a three-hour workshop with a group of young citizens, age 20-25.
It is evident that the ‘personas’ of this case were less heavily based on empirical data and on general statistical data than those personas used by Grudin & Pruitt (2002).
The ‘personas’ and scenarios of this case were developed as basis for a student design project, where IT students were asked to work with prototyping in the municipal service office domain. Based on records of interviews and observations with citizens and municipal workers, the course teachers/researchers developed a set of scenarios and ‘personas’ that the students were asked to use as starting points when carrying out an iterative design process.
At the same time, we were facing the underlying problem, that no matter the approach taken, the particular users we studied may never (again) use the citizen services (e.g. people who do not for a predictable period of time need new passport, to move, get divorced, have new children or need support for rent). Even when interviewing people at the exit of the citizen services office, it was evident that most citizens simply fixed their “problem” and never again, or not for a foreseeable future at least, need to think about this or similar issues again. To get more substantial data, we would be left to study the “frequent flyers” of citizen services, primarily young people who tend to move more frequently, need rent support, etc. But even for such citizens, encounters are few and far between, hence they are not easily studied through interviews or observation.
One example of a design idea/prototype developed in this activity is a tablet device that helped citizens navigate the service provision process by interpreting and helping fill out bureaucratic forms, offering related services according to life situations, and making apparent what other citizens in similar situations had done (Borchorst & Bødker, 2011). Throughout the student design process, prototypes were iterated and confronted with scenarios and ‘personas.’
This case is slightly unique in eGov+ in that design was primarily carried out by graduate students, in a course setting. One graduate student and the supervisor were, however, also active researchers and had carried out interviews and observations. This may have created the distance that made students “pick another ‘persona,’” at the same time as these students were no more distant from citizens as would be any random designer in a municipal development organization or a software manufacturer delivering IT solutions to such settings.
The ‘personas’ were summarizing the research findings from observations and interviews in the citizen services office and looked like the following: Ahmed is a citizen of the world. Yet, somewhat in contrast to this, he is motivated in his life by a wish to own his own home, to live in Denmark. He prefers face-to-face deals in general, and he does e.g. most of his shopping in this manner. He is heavily dominated by his concerns for his close family and their everyday life in Denmark (school, housing, etc.) and his wider family. This family is spread across the world and he makes contact with members whenever possible. Ahmed is used to visit the municipal office in question. He is used to cell phones whereas he does not use Internet banking. He travels with his family to meet relatives whenever possible.
In this case, the ‘personas’ were mainly chosen to represent a variety of different preferences regarding their specific encounters with the municipality (f2f, phone, online) and the spectrum of services they might need. Hence people we met, either when making observations or in the exit interviews, were merged into the ‘personas’. E.g. we observed a family that came in to have passports and health cards, and another that was moving. These two situations were presented as scenarios for the same ‘persona’. In this case, the relatives of the person, although not presented as ‘personas’ themselves, were substantial part of the activity. Hence the Ahmed ‘persona’ is actually also an Aisha ‘persona’ and three kids ditto. In this manner we produced an interconnected set of ‘personas’ and scenarios, rather than complete personas, which in this case would have been very long, with basically quite similar action possibilities, at the same time as all of those would be very infrequent. It was our assessment that the work to make such full-blown personas simply did not match their usefulness in the design process (because of their infrequent and unpredictable action possibilities).
Based on a more detailed description of Ahmed and five other ‘personas’ (not included here), the students made a systematic analysis of the relationship between e.g. Ahmed, other ‘personas,’ the Citizens’ Services and other similar agencies. They were asked to build mood-boards to capture these relationships. Generally, mood-boards are quite unstructured ways of capturing anything from look and feel to emotion in design and HCI (see e.g. Benyon, 2010). The students were asked to use whatever pictures and materials they found useful. These mood-boards helped students capture background experiences of the ‘personas’ and made some of the student groups in particular make specific ‘personas’ their own, quite similar to how Grudin & Pruitt (2002) present their ways of using personas at Microsoft. Other groups of students quite literally chose the path of least resistance and worked with the ‘persona’ that was most like themselves, based on the argument that “Line (another
Parental Leave
This case study addressed the interaction and collaboration involved in the planning and control of parental
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leave in a municipality. The planning of a leave involves two citizens (the parents) along with a municipal office and several other stakeholders such as the parents’ employers and labour unions. The subsidiaries for being a parent, as well as the tailoring of how to get these subsidiaries, are extremely flexible but also very complex (see Borchorst et al., 2009).
In order to embrace such differences we created Lone in addition to Mette. In sum, Lone was taking a different stance in a trade-off situation between inertia and taking the opportunity. Lone and Mette are different, but described roughly along the same dimensions. With these ‘personas’ we were enquiring the design space in two ways: As designers we would fantasize about how Lone would deal with trade-off situations in parental leave, and with a real user (as the case with our mothers' groups) we got confrontation and extra inspiration leading to new understanding. With real users we continuously discovered design space dimensions not previously conceived of. As discussed in (Borchorst et al., 2009) early parenthood is a highly emotional setting. Parents frame as enduring tremendous hardship due to sleep deprivation etc. Making the right choices about the child’s upbringing is of utmost importance to many young families, and the rest of their lives seem to be on hold. It seemed to be important to capture this emotional layer in our ‘personas’ so as to convey the emotions to municipal designers, caseworkers, and fellow researchers (perhaps more than to the new mothers as such). Accordingly, the ‘personas’ were very long and had a rich emotional toning, relative to the other ‘personas’ discussed in this paper (see abbreviated versions in fig. 1). An interesting twist to this is that even though the absolute majority of the researchers/designers in this case were male, and parental leave takers (in Scandinavia) are almost 50% male, we chose to make all citizen personas female. One reason to do so was that we needed extra scaffolding when empathetically engaging with the prototypes from the female points of view.
The design case focused on a web-based timeline, called CaseLine, where the involved actors were supported in communicating and negotiating plans and decisions (see Borchorst et al., 2009; Bohøj et al., 2010; Borchorst & Bødker, 2011). The iterative development of the timeline prototype included observational studies of the activity in municipal offices, and interviews with parents and so-called mothers’ groups. The design process included several design iterations using ‘personas’, scenarios, paper and software prototypes in encounters with groups of citizens and caseworkers. We chose to interact with one type of actor at the time and did workshops with participants from one group of users at a time (e.g. mothers, caseworkers). We never mixed stakeholder groups. This enabled us to control the refinement of ‘personas’, scenarios, and prototypes better. The ‘personas’ and scenarios were used in discussions with citizens/expecting parents, in workshops with caseworkers, and when generally presenting CaseLine in the project. The ‘personas’ in this case were used in scenarios and contained an elaborated focus on emotions. The emotional focus came out of the field studies where hardship turned out to be a shared emotion or experience of new mothers: “New parents meet around their shared experience of e.g. sleep deprivation and screaming babies. These are hardships they see themselves enduring in contrast to others, who consequently are not seen as belonging to the tribe. Just as this tribe of parental leave takers overlaps with a number of other values, the citizens are also simultaneously members of many other tribes. “ (Borchorst et al., 2009).
In this case ‘personas’ were useful resources in the ongoing work with scenarios. Even though the ‘personas’ were present in all meetings, hanging on our walls, distributed to everybody in the project, etc., Cooper’s (2004) paradigmatic example of what a designer would exclaim during the meeting; that “persona X would never do that!” did not occur once, despite lots of scenarios being discussed. This is probably not because we completely internalized the views of the ‘personas’ and effortlessly shifted between their perspectives and others. Rather, we suggest that ‘personas’ need to be taken on by somebody, either voluntarily, or by assignment by the design group. This may be a good reason for some sorts of role-playing in the design process (Bødker & Christiansen , 1997; Mogensen & Trigg, 1992; Halskov & Dalsgaard, 2006; 2010).
Data from previous interviews were used as data for producing ‘personas’ and scenarios. We used these, and primarily the scenarios in focus group interviews with new mothers as in the following workshop: The Mette scenario (part of the Mette persona, outlined in fig. 1) is read out loud and the facilitator asks if this scenario is relevant to the women? [there is silence from the five participants]. The facilitator says: “You may answer: This is not relevant” Mother A: “It is ‘no’ from me.” Mother B: “I actually have to find a new job. But all I’m thinking is that it needs to match my plan.”
In this case, ‘personas’ were supplemented with scenarios that did not necessary link to one ‘persona’. What became a ‘persona’ and what, a scenario was somewhat arbitrary in practice. However, the ‘personas’ would have been very long if we had not utilized that strategy (similar to the problem with personas in the previous case). In addition, stories felt more likely to be read than person descriptions. Rather than “talking back”, it is a question of “talking more about”.
Even though Mette’s dilemma was not as such relevant for the participants in this workshop, it was not invented by the designers, but came from a previous workshop. By confronting these past data, through the Mette ‘persona’ with other real users, we learned that there were different coping strategies when dealing with such contingencies, and not least did we learn about the “It better fit my plan!” strategy.
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Figure 1. Outline of the Mette persona and example use scenario. Municipal Plans
dilemmas and how such discussions might be supported via IT. (Further details in Bohøj et al., 2011).
This case explored citizen deliberation in municipal planning through two interconnected prototypes for desktop computers and smartphones, respectively. We worked with two primary user groups: Citizens and municipal planners. Whereas planners are easily identified, we targeted citizens through two community/NGO groups. We conducted in-depth interviews with municipal planners and managers, focus-group interviews with the two NGO groups, and supplementary individual interviews with citizens.
Initially, we gathered data from citizens who had extensive prior experience with democratic participation within municipal planning in the form of citizen interest groups and NGOs. The first data were used for describing the main features of a selection of ‘personas’. We produced two ‘personas’ that were used within the team of designers rather than in the participatory design sessions–at this early stage we focused on obtaining better narratives rather than confirming and getting reactions from users/citizens.
The focus of the case was the different ways for citizens to act and reflect on proposed plans, both while physically close to the planning object, and when remote from it. In the spirit of Danish municipal planning, and as continuation of our focus on citizen-municipality encounters, the idea was for citizens to engage in continuous discussions with other citizens, hereby creating proposals that municipal workers were better able to process and help turn into concrete changes in the physical environment (Bohøj et al., 2011).
These personas were relatively condensed and also with focus on emotions and drives, for instance in this introduction to Claus: “Personality features: Fighting spirit, frustrated, social, strong sense for local surroundings, been living for a long time in the region.” The scenarios depicted the personas in situations of their everyday life, when they encountered potential changes that mattered to them–and their technologymediated responses.
In this design process, we utilized a broad set of design approaches including future workshops, extreme scenarios, role-playing games and cultural probes. As we progressed, we gradually narrowed our focus, introducing scenarios, storyboards, paper prototypes, and mock-ups of various kinds. We moderated discussions towards concrete examples of actual ongoing planning situations. We constructed role-playing games assigning different roles to citizens asking them to discuss fictive
Later on in the process, we also gathered more data from citizens that were less involved, and developed these data into scenarios, while refining of our ‘personas’. In particular, this gave inspiration for use situations, which we had not imagined ourselves, such as one respondent who was following the local news while temporarily being stationed in Iceland. Broadening the scope of participants enabled us to gather data more quickly, as the latter citizens were more easily accessed.
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Once we got to the point of presenting prototypes to planners and municipal stakeholders, the ‘personas’ were used for this purpose as well. Specifically the ‘personas’ were used to situate future scenarios where our prototype was deployed (Bohøj et al. 2011):
12 personas are meant as a generic tool for nation-wide eGovernment improvement projects, in this case of municipal plans we found this too blunt a tool. In this case, as well as the parental leave case, it was very difficult to get the ‘personas’ to talk back. We experienced this not only in one case, but in two, which too clearly point towards the problems of activation personas in design.
“Claus is out on his weekly run in the forest when his mobile phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He takes it out and sees that it is a notification from the Mobile Democracy application. The notification tells Claus that there is a proposed change in the municipal plan nearby. He clicks on the notification to find a description of the plans to build a new wastewater plant at his current location. (…) He adds the comment ‘This beautiful forest would be ruined with a wastewater plant.’ (…) Later that evening he (…) sees that more citizens have commented and a municipal planner has argued that a new wastewater plant is needed, because the old one is no longer sufficient. Claus realizes that he has potential allies among the other commentators. He decides to write a more elaborate discussion comment(…)”
PERSONAS OR ‘PERSONAS’?
This section summarizes and discusses what we have learned about ‘personas’ through the four cases. It goes on to discuss the differences between ‘personas’ and personas, i.e. the personas literature, before, finally, it goes on to address the roles of personas in the kind of design situations that we have worked with, which are generally characterized by rather evasive use situations, and an abundance of actual, or at least possible, future users. What have we learned about ‘personas’ in the four cases? In the paper we have described how we worked with quite a varied set of ‘personas’ in the cases.
When illustrating each persona with a face, we chose pictures from our workshops, i.e. people we have met several times and had a relation with. But the pictures represented a persona with personality traits that were different from the person we knew which ended up being very disturbing to everybody. In this sense, we may, involuntarily, have produced our own Frankenstein ‘personas.’ Interestingly this is a case where it is primarily because the researchers themselves were the primary users of the ‘persona’ that this seemed to happen. Outsiders may not in the same way have known the real people and been confused.
A pervasive challenge has been to make our ‘personas’ embrace the rather short-lived use situations of citizen’s services. We have in several cases worked with scenarios that are not tied to specific ‘personas’ mainly because we found the prospects of extending our ‘personas’ would not add much value to the descriptions already there. Even though the notion of Frankenstein personas was not introduced to embrace this phenomenon, in this case, such personas would have to embrace an endless number of action possibilities that would be rarely and infrequently activated for each persona, perhaps lending itself to a “Swiss-army-knife” metaphor rather than that of Frankenstein’s monster.
In this case we had a very literal problem of distance, as the design team was located 250 km away from the users. Although not an extreme distance, it removed all possibilities for more spontaneous interaction, and required long-term planning of design meetings. However, even in this case we did not choose the simple solution of letting personas stand in for the inaccessible users, as advocated in persona theory (Grudin & Pruitt, 2002; Cooper, 2004). Rather we prioritized interaction with real users, just like we largely did in the other cases. Despite the travel, the interaction with real users did not pose any insurmountable problems, and accounted for less than a pct. of the time spent on the project.
We have found that minimalism may do for ‘personas’ is some cases, in particular when the ‘personas’ were used in active engagement of designers in workshop settings. Our ‘personas’ have been used to capture citizen strategies at many levels, but it has been very difficult to work with ‘personas’ that capture all levels all at the same time. In several of our cases we have found it important to work with despicable persons, unpleasant emotions such as hardship, and people who are, by purpose or not, “working the system” (see e.g. also Borchorst, 2011). In our empirical basis there are many such persons and situations. Turning these into full-blown personas, we found ourselves making assumptions and stereotyping beyond what was really necessary to bring these perspectives to the table, as in the Self-service case. As a matter of fact there is a total lack of such personas in the 12 personas, and we are proposing that this may exactly be the reason why this is indeed a very fine line to walk, ethically and practically.
In municipal planning, every citizen has the right to participate. Even so, we chose to focus on citizens that were realistic participants, based on our interviews with NGOs and municipalities. Interestingly, this segment of the population, which we called, “medium tech savvy, medium engagement in community life” does not figure in borger.dk’s “12 personas”. We did not try to get a statistically valid representation, rather we depended on qualitative interpretation of our field data. We constructed only two personas and since all further use situations that later turned up in the data collection were found to be believable for casting with these, so we saw little need for extending our gallery. While borger.dk's
Our main use of ‘personas’ throughout the cases has been in workshop settings with designers, governmental
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users and managers, or citizens. In all of these cases, we, the researchers/developers of the ‘personas,’ have been present, except for some of the design activities in the Citizen services case where students took over. In these same cases, the involved designers and governmental users and managers in particular had some preunderstanding of the use setting being designed for. Our ‘personas’ seemed to bring those pre-understandings and assumptions to the forefront of attention – they played an important role in the interpretation of the ‘personas’. With or without our companionship it was, however, difficult for us to make the ‘personas’ live their own life and talk back in the design situation. The ‘personas’ did not get us any closer to imagining the actual use situations. At best although with some difficulty, they brought us closer to actively remembering our prior knowledge of citizen service design.
extensive as compared to Grudin & Pruitt, (2002), they provided richness and insight coming out of meeting real people. This touches upon the broader issue of trustworthiness of the personas. Designers and other stakeholders seemed largely to trust our personas, to listen to them in design, and this may well be because we could truthfully say that we had been there and met the people in question. The 12 personas of borger.dk, in contrast, are model users, which may not exactly be the way e.g. Pruitt & Grudin (2002) look at personas. They present a generic and quite general cast of characters that have little edge, and are mainly positive. As discussed earlier this is quite likely an effect of trying to generalize segments of citizens without stereotyping the darker sides of people. Where it may well be possible to develop such characters as part of the cast of your favourite TV series, such work is a dynamic process that does not seem to lend itself well to once and for all development of personas. In our experiences, it is by being picked up or adopted by people who know the use situations that personas have a chance of being used actively in design.
One may ask if we simply weren’t careful enough with our ‘personas’? The first case, with quotes instead of personas illustrates that people actually may take ownership of the 'personas', in ways quite similar to how Mogensen & Trigg (1992) describe their use of situation cards. This is where workshop participants are taking on persona or taking responsibility for a persona. Accordingly, it seems that such possible ownership is not intrinsic to the persona as much as it is an effect of the design activity. Pruitt & Adlin (2006) emphasize that the challenge for the persona responsible developers is not creating personas, but in continuously ascertaining that they are alive and present in the minds of the development team. We can add to this, that it is a challenge even for the persona creators to keep them present for themselves, in particular since they get no help from others (Friess, 2012).
Through such ’personas’ it is possible to introduce absent, but potential, future users into the design process, where the ’personas’ are adopted by participants;; who may be other users, other kinds of users, designers, or other stakeholders. Important is, we suggest, that they, themselves, know the use context and use situation. This puts the 'personas' more in the position of adding ”from the outside”-elements to a design workshop, just like one might add prototypes, exotic technologies, situation cards and more. While we have found that the infusion of ad-hoc ’personas’ in design, accompanied by processes to activate them, to be quite useful in design, we see no evidence that personas can in any way substitute for the involvement of real users in such design activities. And this is actually before we have even started doing participatory design, because we are only introducing insight from use into design, not the other way around.
We underline the importance of using ‘personas’ as masks that various stakeholders in a development process take on in order to see the world from the perspectives of the personas (Nielsen, 2011), and to be seen as another person. Nygaard (1986) outlined four aspects of informatics: phenomenology, analysis, synthesis and multi-perspective reflection. Regarding the latter the merit is to inspire a “study of how changes introduced according to one viewpoint affect properties of the phenomena when regarded from another viewpoint” (Nygaard, 1986, p.4). According to our reflection on the cases, the responsibility rests heavily on the designers for orchestrating this mask-dressing activity. Having personas at hand does not necessarily in itself improve discussion (as illustrated also in Friess, 2012 and Matthews et al., 2012). A more deliberate focus on multiple viewpoints is thus likely to help such problems as when the student designers went on to “pick another ‘persona’” that suited their own perspective better.
CONCLUSION
With this in mind, we hesitate to say that the deployment of personas as such brings designers closer to the actual use situation. In the eGovernment context personas may provide a way of holding on to some of the many short-lived use activities, but for exactly the reason of the short lived nature, it seems like substantial overkill to develop complete personas. There is one way in particular which the use of ad-hoc personas brings participants, designers and users alike, closer to the use situation. That is when personas help activate, and reframe, pre-existing knowledge about use. In particular this is true for the prejudices about citizens and government that all stakeholders have.
Representativity becomes important when a persona is used in design activity and someone, be it a designer or a user, is questioning that a persona really exists. In such a discussion, a statistically valid common behaviour stands stronger than an isolated account with unknown occurrence frequency. However, questioning the findings never happened in our cases. One explanation for this is that although our empirical studies were not
We have not initiated design “by” the users through our personas. As such, personas cannot make absent users have an active role in design. Primarily the personas have been used to convey the role of citizens to designers or to other users (the municipality professionals),
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and as such they have not played a very active role in doing design with citizens. Rather, when applying personas, we have primarily carried out design for citizens. That is to say we have seen many examples where the personas were used to activate the pre-understanding of municipal designers and stakeholders. There are obvious exceptions from this, and in two of the cases we actually used personas, and primarily scenarios, of citizens to confront other citizens, primarily though to develop our understanding of the use situation further.
G., Star, S.L., Gasser, L. & Turner, W. (eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 217-234. Bødker, S. & Christiansen, E. (2004). Designing for ephemerality and prototypicality. DIS'04, ACM, pp. 255 - 260. Borger.dk (2006). Personas til den fællesoffentlige borgerportal [Personas in the common, publicservice citizen’s portal]. Online 2012-01-31 at: https://www.borger.dk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Par tnerforum/Personasrapport%20v%201.1.pdf
Do personas support participatory design? Not really! Based on the four cases, we cannot argue that personas per se support participatory design. On the contrary, the pseudo participation by the personas may draw attention away from real participation of actual users or citizens. Our cases did, however, also show that ‘personas’ or personas are useful intermediaries that help the designers’ process and present data from citizen participation. Finally, they may help designers tune in on citizens when preparing actual design participation.
Briefs, U. Ciborra, C., & Schneider. L (1982). Systems design for, with, and by the users. Proceedings of IFIP WG 9.1 Working Conference on Systems Design for, with, and by the Users. Riva del Sole, Italy, 20-24 September 1982. Chang, Y, Lim, Y., & Stolterman, E. (2008). Personas: from theory to practices. NordiCHI'05, ACM, pp. 439-442. Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Boston: Safari.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
eGov+ is sponsored by the Danish Strategic Research Council.
Friess, E. (2012). Personas and decision making in the design process: An ethnographic study, CHI 2012, ACM, pp. 1209-1218.
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