research-article

Personas, people and participation: challenges from the trenches of local government

Authors:

Susanne Bødker,

Ellen Christiansen,

Pär-Ola ZanderAuthors Info & Claims

PDC '12: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1

Pages 91 - 100

https://doi.org/10.1145/2347635.2347649

Published: 12 August 2012 Publication History

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?

References

[1]

Benyon, D. (2010). Designing Interactive Systems. Pearson.

[2]

Bohøj, M., Borchorst, N. G., Bødker, S., Korn, M., & Zander, P. O. (2011). Public deliberation in municipal planning: Supporting action and reflection with mobile technology. Communities & Technologies'11, ACM, pp. 88--97.

Digital Library

[3]

Bohøj, M., Borchorst, N. G., Bouvin, N. O. Bødker, S., & Zander. P. O. (2010). Timeline collaboration. CHI'10, ACM pp. 523--532.

Digital Library

[4]

Borchorst, N. G. (2011). Participatory Citizenship - supporting citizen empowerment in digitally mediated public service provision (PhD Thesis). Aarhus University, Aarhus.

[5]

Borchorst, N. G. & Bøødker, S. (2011). "You Probably Shouldn't Give Them Too Much Information"--Towards Citizen-Government Collaboration. ECSCW 2011, pp. 173--192.

[6]

Borchorst, N. G., Bødker, S. & Zander P. O. (2009). The boundaries of participatory citizenship. ECSCW 2009, pp. 1--20.

[7]

Bødker, S. (1987). Prototyping revisited - design with users in a cooperative setting. Aarhus University, (DAIMI PB: 233).

[8]

Bødker, S. & Christiansen, E. (1995). A conceptual toolbox for designing CSCW applications. COOP'95. INRIA Press. pp. 266--284.

[9]

Bødker, S. & Christiansen, E. (1997). Scenarios as springboards in design. In: Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work. Bowker G., Star, S. L., Gasser, L. & Turner, W. (eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 217--234.

[10]

Bødker, S. & Christiansen, E. (2004). Designing for ephemerality and prototypicality. DIS'04, ACM, pp. 255--260.

Digital Library

[11]

Borger. dk (2006). Personas til den fællesoffentlige borgerportal {Personas in the common, public-service citizen's portal}. Online 2012-01-31 at: https://www.borger.dk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Partnerforum/Personasrapport%20v%201.1.pdf

[12]

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.

[13]

Chang, Y, Lim, Y., & Stolterman, E. (2008). Personas: from theory to practices. NordiCHI'05, ACM, pp. 439--442.

Digital Library

[14]

Cooper, A. (2004). The inmates are running the asylum. Boston: Safari.

Digital Library

[15]

Friess, E. (2012). Personas and decision making in the design process: An ethnographic study, CHI 2012, ACM, pp. 1209--1218.

Digital Library

[16]

Grudin, J. (1990). Constraints in product development organizations. In PDC'90 pp. 14--21.

[17]

Grudin, J. (1993). Obstacles to participatory design in large product development organizations. In Schuler, D. & Namioka, A. (Eds.), Participatory design: Principles and practices, pp. 99--119.

[18]

Grudin, J. & Pruitt, J. (2002). Personas, participatory design, and product development: An infrastructure for engagement. PDC'02, pp. 144--161.

[19]

Halskov, K. & Dalsgaard, P., (2010). "Inspiration Cards". Position paper for Workshop on Artifacts in Design: Representation, Ideation, and Process, CHI 2010, Atlanta, USA.

[20]

Halskov, K., Dalsgaard, P. (2006) Inspiration Card Workshops. DIS '06, ACM, pp. 2--11.

Digital Library

[21]

Matthews, T., Judge, T. K. & Whittaker, S. (2012). How do designers and user experience professionals actually perceive and use personas? CHI 2012, ACM, pp. 1219--1228.

Digital Library

[22]

Mogensen, P., & Trigg, R. H. (1992). Artifacts as triggers for participatory analysis. PDC'92 pp. 55--62.

[23]

Nielsen, L. (2011). Persona: brugerfokuseret design {persona - user focused design}. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

[24]

Nygaard, K. (1986). Program Development as a Social Activity. IFIP 10th World Computer Congress.

[25]

Pruitt, J. S., & Adlin, T. (2006). The persona lifecycle: keeping people in mind throughout product design. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufman.

Digital Library

Cited By

Salminen JJung SJansen B(2024)Investigating Persona Viewing Behavior: An Eye-Tracking Study on Portrait-Format Persona ProfileProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685376(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685376
Nemcova VKunešová VMikulik RKnoche H(2024)Focusing on what matters: Crafting stroke survivor personas relevant to systems supporting their self-managementAdjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3677045.3685419(1-7)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677045.3685419
Salminen JSantos JJung SJansen B(2023)How does an imaginary persona's attractiveness affect designers' perceptions and IT solutions? An experimental study on users' remote working needsInformation Technology & People10.1108/ITP-09-2022-072936:8(196-225)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-09-2022-0729
Show More Cited By

Personas, people and participation: challenges from the trenches of local government
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

Personas: from theory to practices
NordiCHI '08: Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges

Persona is a technique being used by practicing designers in interaction design. Existing research presents the ways personas should/could be used, or report new efforts of making good use of the persona concept. Comparing to the primary idea of persona,...
Participation in design things
PDC '08: Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008

This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and ...
Two-Level Personas for Nested Design Spaces
CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The persona approach is often treated as a single user-centered design method, but there are variations and adaptations for different design contexts which go beyond local customization. The paper discusses a set of dimensions and success criteria for ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

PDC '12: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1

August 2012

147 pages

ISBN:9781450308465

DOI:10.1145/2347635

Editors:
Kim Halskov
Aarhus University, Denmark
,
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus
Polytechnic of Namibia, Namibia
,
Yanki Lee
Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom
,
Jesper Simonsen
Roskilde University, Denmark
,
Keld Bødker
Roskilde University, Denmark

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Roskilde University

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 August 2012

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

PDC '12

Sponsor:

CPSR

PDC '12: 12th Participatory Design Conference

August 12 - 16, 2012

Roskilde, Denmark

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 49 of 289 submissions, 17%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

36
Total Citations
View Citations
1,003
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)86
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 03 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Salminen JJung SJansen B(2024)Investigating Persona Viewing Behavior: An Eye-Tracking Study on Portrait-Format Persona ProfileProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685376(1-12)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679318.3685376
Nemcova VKunešová VMikulik RKnoche H(2024)Focusing on what matters: Crafting stroke survivor personas relevant to systems supporting their self-managementAdjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3677045.3685419(1-7)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677045.3685419
Salminen JSantos JJung SJansen B(2023)How does an imaginary persona's attractiveness affect designers' perceptions and IT solutions? An experimental study on users' remote working needsInformation Technology & People10.1108/ITP-09-2022-072936:8(196-225)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-09-2022-0729
Guan KSalminen JJung SJansen B(2023)Leveraging Personas for Social Impact: A Review of Their Applications to Social Good in DesignInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.224756840:19(5569-5584)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2247568
Kaate ISalminen JSantos JJung SOlkkonen RJansen B(2023)The realness of fakesInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103096178:COnline publication date: 1-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103096
Salminen JJung SAlmerekhi HCambria EJansen B(2023)How Can Natural Language Processing and Generative AI Address Grand Challenges of Quantitative User Personas?HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers10.1007/978-3-031-48057-7_14(211-231)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-48057-7_14
Salminen JJung SJansen B(2022)Intentionally Biasing User Representation?: Investigating the Pros and Cons of Removing Toxic Quotes from Social Media PersonasNordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3546155.3546647(1-13)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546155.3546647
Salminen JWenyun Guan KJung SJansen B(2022)Use Cases for Design Personas: A Systematic Review and New FrontiersProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517589(1-21)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517589
Salminen JNielsen LBahloul MJørgensen RSantos JJung SJansen B(2022)Persona preparedness: a survey instrument for measuring the organizational readiness for deploying personasInformation Technology and Management10.1007/s10799-022-00373-925:2(173-198)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-022-00373-9
Jansen BSalminen JJung SGuan KJansen BSalminen JJung SGuan K(2022)Evaluating Data-Driven PersonasData-Driven Personas10.1007/978-3-031-02231-9_9(209-237)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02231-9_9
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents