Developing Ontologies and Persona to Support and Enhance Requirements Engineering Activities – A Case Study

AbstractThis paper provides an insight into incorporating persona concept and developing ontologies to support requirements engineering activities via a university course registration web application system case study. The objectives are to examine (1) how the concept of persona, in the context of the concepts of viewpoint, goal, scenario, task, and requirement, may be integrated in a unified environment to enable stakeholders and developers gain a better understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors and identify missing requirements early in the requirements engineering process, and (2) how the concepts and their relationships may be explicitly specified ontologically to help establish a knowledge repository and foster a shared common understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors among developers and stakeholders during the requirements analysis and modeling activity. A five-step iterative ontology development process is developed to help guide developers in the process of building the ontologies for the case study. We present the persona and viewpoint documents created and the ontology specifications specified in Protégé-Frames via applying our ontology development process

Information Design for Personas in Four Professional Domains of User Experience Design, Healthcare, Market Research, and Social Media Strategy

Practitioners in user-centric industries have increasingly recognized the applicability of personas. However, the methods used to create personas in different domains remain inconsistent and unsystematic. We analyzed 51 studies focused on designing personas for professional purposes and found the practice most prevalent in the user experience design, healthcare, market research, and social media strategy domains. Within these domains, user experience design personas are characterized by their focus on user activity goals, health personas on medical patients’ physical symptoms, market research personas on customers’ lifestyles, and social media strategy personas on interactions within and between online communities. We identify and compare the elements in the personas. Based on these, we provide guidelines for professionals interested in developing personas for understanding barriers to positive user experience, recruiting users, and building online communities, including how to represent persona details related to lifestyle and health, contexts of product usage, and scaling of online data

Ontological support for managing non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare

We designed and implemented an ontological solution which makes provisions for choosing adequate devices/sensors for remote monitoring of patients who are suffering from post-stroke health complications. We argue that non-functional requirements in pervasive healthcare systems can be elicited and managed through semantics stored in ontological models and reasoning created upon them. Our contribution is twofold: we enrich the elicitation process and specification of non-functional requirements within the requirements engineering discipline and we address the pervasiveness of healthcare software systems through the way of choosing devices embedded in them and users expectations in terms of having access to pervasive services personalized to their needs

Strengths and Weaknesses of Persona Creation Methods:Guidelines and Opportunities for Digital Innovations

Persona is a technique for enhancing user understanding and improving the user-centered design of digital products. Persona creation has traditionally been divided into Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods approaches. However, no literature systematically contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We review the literature to map the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and evaluate the potential of personas for the domain of digital innovation. We provide insights for better creation and use of personas by both researchers and practitioners, especially those that are new to personas, deploying personas in a new domain, or familiar with only one of the persona creation approaches

Extensión de la técnica personas de la disciplina interacción persona-ordenador y su incorporación en las actividades de requisitos de la ingeniería del software

GUIDE: GUÍa De Especificación para el desarrollo por el usuario final. Proyecto CCG10-UAM/TIC-5772 (2011) subvencionado por el DGUI de la Comunidad de Madrid y la UA

Effectiveness of Persona with Personality Traits on Conceptual Design

Conceptual design is an important skill in Software Engineering. Teaching conceptual design that can deliver a useful product is challenging, particularly when access to real users is limited. This study explores the effects of the use of Holistic Personas (i.e. a persona enriched with personality traits) on students' performance in creating conceptual designs. Our results indicate that the students were able to identify the personality traits of personas and their ratings of the personalities match closely with the intended personalities. A majority of the participants stated that their designs were tailored to meet the needs of the given personas' personality traits. Results suggest that the Holistic Personas can help students to take into account personality traits in the conceptual design process. Further studies are warranted to assess the value of incorporating Holistic Personas in conceptual design training for imparting skills of producing in-depth design by taking personalities into account.10 page(s

How to Create Personas: Three Persona Creation Methodologies with Implications for Practical Employment

Background: Personas are a technique for enhanced understanding of users and customers to improve the user-centered design of systems and products. Their creation can be categorized using three persona creation methodologies: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods. Despite the apparent differences in these methodologies, no previous review has systemically compared and contrasted the strengths and weaknesses of each of these methodologies for persona development. Method: This manuscript maps and navigates persona literature to identify the benefits and challenges of these three persona creation methodologies. Furthermore, the strategies and opportunities of the different methodologies are presented. Results: The results summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three principal persona creation methodologies and offer suggestions of the benefits of their employment. Conclusion: In conclusion, we offer insights into the construction and usage of personas for practitioners and researchers, and we propose a framework to determine which persona creation methodology is most suitable for a given context. Keywords: Algorithmically-Generated Personas, Persona Analytics, Persona Science

How to Create Personas : Three Persona Creation Methodologies with Implications for Practical Employment

Background: Personas are a technique for enhanced understanding of users and customers to improve the user-centered design of systems and products. Their creation can be categorized using three persona creation methodologies: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods. Despite the apparent differences in these methodologies, no previous review has systemically compared and contrasted the strengths and weaknesses of each of these methodologies for persona development. Method: This manuscript maps and navigates persona literature to identify the benefits and challenges of these three persona creation methodologies. Furthermore, the strategies and opportunities of the different methodologies are presented. Results: The results summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three principal persona creation methodologies and offer suggestions of the benefits of their employment. Conclusion: In conclusion, we offer insights into the construction and usage of personas for practitioners and researchers, and we propose a framework to determine which persona creation methodology is most suitable for a given context.© 2022 by the Association for Information Systems. 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 full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than the Association for Information Systems must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from: AIS Administrative Office, P.O. Box 2712 Atlanta, GA, 30301-2712 Attn: Reprints, or via email from [email protected]=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

How does an imaginary persona's attractiveness affect designers' perceptions and IT solutions? An experimental study on users' remote working needs

Purpose The “what is beautiful is good” (WIBIG) effect implies that observers tend to perceive physically attractive people in a positive light. The authors investigate how the WIBIG effect applies to user personas, measuring designers' perceptions and task performance when employing user personas for the design of information technology (IT) solutions. Design/methodology/approach In a user experiment, the authors tested six different personas with 235 participants that were asked to develop remote work solutions based on their interaction with a fictitious user persona. Findings The findings showed that a user persona's perceived attractiveness was positively correlated with other perceptions of the persona. The personas' completeness, credibility, empathy, likability and usefulness increased with attractiveness. More attractive personas were also perceived as more agreeable, emotionally stable, extraverted and open, and the participants spent more time engaging with personas they perceived attractive. A linguistic analysis indicated that the IT solutions created for more attractive user personas demonstrated a higher degree of affect, but for the most part, task outputs did not vary by the personas' perceived attractiveness. Research limitations/implications The WIBIG effect applies when designing IT solutions with user personas, but its effect on task outputs appears limited. The perceived attractiveness of a user persona can impact how designers interact with and engage with the persona, which can influence the quality or the type of the IT solutions created based on the persona. Also, the findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction. Practical implications The findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction. Originality/value Because personas are created to closely resemble real people, the authors might expect the WIBIG effect to apply. The WIBIG effect might lead decision makers to favor more attractive personas when designing IT solutions. However, despite its potential relevance for decision making with personas, as far as the authors know, no prior study has investigated whether the WIBIG effect extends to the context of personas. Overall, it is important to understand how human factors apply to IT system design with personas, so that the personas can be created to minimize potentially detrimental effects as much as possible.© Joni Salminen, Jo~ao M. Santos, Soon-gyo Jung and Bernard J. Jansen. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcodefi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Big Data, Small Personas : How Algorithms Shape the Demographic Representation of Data-Driven User Segments

Derived from the notion of algorithmic bias, it is possible that creating user segments such as personas from data results in over- or under-representing certain segments (FAIRNESS), does not properly represent the diversity of the user populations (DIVERSITY), or produces inconsistent results when hyperparameters are changed (CONSISTENCY). Collecting user data on 363M video views from a global news and media organization, we compare personas created from this data using different algorithms. Results indicate that the algorithms fall into two groups: those that generate personas with low diversity–high fairness and those that generate personas with high diversity–low fairness. The algorithms that rank high on diversity tend to rank low on fairness (Spearman's correlation: −0.83). The algorithm that best balances diversity, fairness, and consistency is Spectral Embedding. The results imply that the choice of algorithm is a crucial step in data-driven user segmentation, because the algorithm fundamentally impacts the demographic attributes of the generated personas and thus influences how decision makers view the user population. The results have implications for algorithmic bias in user segmentation and creating user segments that not only consider commercial segmentation criteria but also consider criteria derived from ethical discussions in the computing community.©2022, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed