A Preliminary Examination of Using Personas to Enhance User-Centered Design

Organizations now routinely collect information about the needs of their consumers/users, but this information is not sufficiently utilized. This research investigates how encapsulating the user needs in a persona affects the resulting design decisions. Personas put a face on the target users and create a vivid design target by using a narrative, picture, and name. In our study, we examine whether personas help designers make more effective design decisions. We also focus on the roles of empathy and memory, and investigate whether personas introduce greater empathy into product design. The results suggest that personas lead to more effective designs when empathy for the persona is created. On the other hand, when the user needs are summarized in a tabular format, the participants must rely on memorization of the user information. The implications of the results and how follow-up studies will tackle unanswered questions are explored

Crowdsourcing Privacy Design Critique: An Empirical Evaluation of Framing Effects

When designed incorrectly, information systems can thwart people’s expectations of privacy. An emerging technique for evaluating systems during the development stage is the crowdsourcing design critique, in which design evaluations are sourced using crowdsourcing platforms. However, we know that information framing has a serious effect on decision-making and can steer design critiques in one way or another. We investigate how the framing of design cases can influence the outcomes of privacy design critiques. Specifically, we test whether -˜Personas’, a central User-Centered Design tool for describing users, can inspire empathy in users while criticizing privacy designs. In an experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (n=456), we show that describing design cases by using personas causes intrusive designs to be criticized more harshly. We discuss how our results can be used to enhance privacy-by-design processes and encourage user-centered privacy engineering

Energizing middle managers' practice in organizational learning

Purpose This paper aims to consider middle managers' influence on organizational learning by exploring how they cope with demands and tensions in their role and whether their practice affects available team energy. Design/methodology/approach In total, 43 managers from three large organizations involved in major change assessed their group's energy using a tested and validated instrument, the OEQ12©. This generated six distinct categories of team energy, from highly productive to corrosive. Thirty-four of these managers, spread across the six categories, completed a Twenty Statements Test and a follow-up interview to explore their cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to coping with resource constraints and tensions in their role. Findings The research provides preliminary insights into what distinguishes a middle manager persona co-ordinating teams with highly productive energy from those managing groups with less available energy to engage with knowledge and learning. It considers why these distinctions may affect collective sensitivities in the organizational learning process. Research limitations/implications Informants were not equally distributed across the six team energy categories; therefore, some middle manager personas are more indicative than others. Practical implications This research suggests areas where middle manager development could potentially improve organizational learning. Originality/value This study offers early empirical evidence that middle managers' orientation to their role is entangled with the process of energizing their teams in organizational learning during change

Towards a Critical Turn in Library UX

In the past decade, cataloguing and classification and information literacy have experienced a critical turn, acknowledging the political, economic, and social forces that shape complex information environments. Library user experience (UX) has yet to undergo such a transformation, however; instead, it continues to be seen as a toolkit of value-neutral approaches for evaluating and improving library services and spaces to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Library UX draws upon ethnography but is also informed by the principles and values of usability and design. Little attention has been paid to the origins or epistemological underpinnings of UX as a construct, the ways these inform UX practice, and ultimately, how they impact what academic libraries are and what they do, however. With the exception of a 2016 article by Lanclos and Asher, the relationship between corporatism, UX, and the mission and values of academic libraries has yet to be acknowledged or examined. This paper seeks to address this gap. While a handful of library UX practitioners have started to promote a more thoughtful study of individuals\u27 activities and needs, in the main, library UX remains a theoretically weak practice, one that sets out to solve complex problems with practical “solutions.” The failure to interrogate UX as a construct and a practice necessarily forecloses the user-centered problems we address, the tools and strategies we use, and the solutions we propose. We contend that UX would benefit from a deeper engagement with user-centered theories emerging from Library and Information Science (LIS) and critical and feminist perspectives on practice, embodiment, and power or risk perpetuating oppressive, hegemonic ideas about the academic library as a white space and its users as able-bodied

An Activity-Centered Design Perspective for the Creation of Museum Exhibits

Approaching design as a flexible process with frameworks for understanding human behavior during exhibit development enables a comprehensive plan for achieving exhibit goals. An Activity-Centered Design Perspective for the Development of Museum Exhibits outlines theoretical design frameworks that support museum goals and responsibilities for the production of exhibit solutions that facilitate desired visitor experiences. The design community follows iterative processes that incorporate a strategic mix of tools for the creation of valuable and successful products and services. Because information and communication technologies are common for the presentation of exhibit messages, an approach to exhibit development that considers exhibit activities and technology and how they effect visitor experience is necessary. An exhibit development strategy with a design perspective frames critical exhibit activities for analyzing the contextual factors that influence visitor behavior and overall visitor experience. The museum industry has an opportunity to incorporate this design perspective to exhibit development as well as the creation of additional museum programs and events that have goals of increasing attendance and attracting a wider and more diverse audience