Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Neate, T., Bourazeri, A., Roper, A., Stumpf, S. and Wilson, S. (2019) Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process. In: 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19), Glasgow, UK, 04-09 May 2019, p. 650. ISBN 9781450359702 (doi: 10.1145/3290605.3300880)

Abstract

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson's disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also afforded additional benefits including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Reflecting on the outcomes from the different user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Stumpf, Dr Simone
• Authors: Neate, T., Bourazeri, A., Roper, A., Stumpf, S., and Wilson, S.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISBN: 9781450359702