Telling stories with personas

Even though the persona method is a well-known tool in the Human-Technology Interaction field for knowing users and their goals, tasks and environments, there are varying opinions about how personas should be developed and used. Many agree that combining personas with scenarios and user stories is useful, but scenarios and user stories can also be defined and used in various ways. The purpose of my master's thesis is to examine with a literature review different ways to develop and use personas together with scenarios and user stories. My thesis aims to gain a broad picture of the topic rather than confirm one, single perspective. I will search for sources in multiple places since quantitative research alone cannot provide complete enough answers to my research questions. I have divided personas into four types based on my literature review. Manual, semi-automatic and automatic personas are based on mostly user research, but they vary on how many steps in their development are done manually. Expert personas are based on knowledge gathered from stakeholders, literature and other experts. Designers should decide the type of persona based on the purpose of the project and available data and resources. The most important elements in persona description are a photo, name, background information, goals, pain points and story. All personas in the project should be comparable by using the same elements in persona descriptions and same layout in persona documents. Deciding what sources are included in a literature review and how extensively new sources are searched for are always subjective decisions. Another limitation of my thesis is that it does not cover visual design methods, such as storyboards or user journeys. There is some academic research about personas, scenarios and user stories, but knowledge about this topic could be broadened and deepened by conducting more research on the effectiveness, popularity and usage of these methods. Comparisons of practices between countries and companies would also be interesting