research-article

Personas and Identity: Looking at Multiple Identities to Inform the Construction of Personas

Authors:

Nicola Marsden,

Monika PröbsterAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper No.: 335, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300565

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Personas are valuable tools to help designers get to know their users and adopt their perspectives. Yet people are complex and multiple identities have to be considered in their interplay to account for a comprehensive representation otherwise, personas might be superficial and prone to activate stereotypes. Therefore, the way users' identities are presented in a limited set of personas is crucial to account for diversity and highlight facets which otherwise would go unnoticed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to the development of personas informed by social identity theory. The effectiveness of this approach is investigated in a qualitative study in the context of the design process for an e-learning platform for women in tech. The results suggest that considering multiple identities in the construction of personas adds value when designing technologies.

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Index Terms

Personas and Identity: Looking at Multiple Identities to Inform the Construction of Personas
1. Social and professional topics

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2019

9077 pages

ISBN:9781450359702

DOI:10.1145/3290605

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Stephen Brewster
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK
,
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
TU Wien, Austria
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Anna Cox
University College London, UK
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Vassilis Kostakos
University of Melbourne, Australia

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Published: 02 May 2019

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https://doi.org/10.23939/sisn2024.16.145
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