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Introduction: Stories About Users

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Book cover Personas - User Focused Design

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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Abstract

You are now reading the second edition of Personas—User Focused Design. Since the first edition, I have done a lot more research, been manager of Center for Persona Research and Application, closed the centre, coached a lot of companies, been in connection with Automated Persona Generation, and experienced how difficult it is to do international personas.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My first article on personas was ‘Scenarios as development tool’ (Nielsen 1998). In the article, I coin what was later to be known personas as model users.

  2. 2.

    You can find my Ph.D. dissertation at http://personaer.dk/wp-content/samlet-udgave-til-load.pdf. See Nielsen (2004).

  3. 3.

    Read more on the Scandinavian design tradition in Bødker et al. (2000).

  4. 4.

    See for example Orr (1996) and how maintenance workers at Rank Xerox describe and talk about the users.

  5. 5.

    The lifeworld can be defined as the reality you take for granted and judge with your common sense. See Schutz and Luckmann (1973), p. 3.

  6. 6.

    Conzoom® segments the population according to where people live. It contains data about average age, education, job, type and size of housing, income, capital, media use, use of transportation, consumption, interests, shopping and leisure habits. Mini-Risc segments according to demography, income, life-view, and values.

  7. 7.

    Microsoft has described how they create persona campaigns by hanging small posters on toilet doors and creating mugs with persona descriptions, photos, etc.

  8. 8.

    About the early history, see Goodwin (2001, 2002), and Brechin (2002). Alan Cooper has written two books, see Cooper (1999) and Cooper et al. (2007).

  9. 9.

    Both within psychology and sociology, anonymous meetings are described. Within sociology, the term ‘the anonymous’ is described as ‘a representation of a type’, within psychology the term stereotype is used. You can read more about types and stereotypes at Schutz and Luckmann (1973) and Macrae and Bodehausen (2001). The difference between clichés and stereotypes can be described as follows: ‘Stereotypes differ from clichés in that the former reduce an entire class (e.g. fat people, depressed women, or post office workers), and let the reader assume the rest. In contrast, a cliché is a hackneyed phrase. A stereotype is not identical to the real thing. Stereotypes seem to work best when characters are not created to be deep, but only to be a mental picture' (Edelstein 1999, p. 13).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lene Nielsen

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  1. Lene Nielsen
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Correspondence to Lene Nielsen .

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Nielsen, L. (2019). Introduction: Stories About Users. In: Personas - User Focused Design. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1_1

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