Personas Help Understand Users’ Needs, Goals and Desires in an Online Institutional Repository
Communicating users' needs, goals and problems help
designers and developers overcome challenges faced by end users.
Personas are used to represent end users’ needs. In our research,
creating personas allowed the following questions to be answered:
Who are the potential user groups? What do they want to achieve by
using the service? What are the problems that users face? What
should the service provide to them? To develop realistic personas, we
conducted a focus group discussion with undergraduate and graduate
students and also interviewed a university librarian. The personas
were created to help evaluating the Institutional Repository that is
based on the DSpace system. The profiles helped to communicate
users' needs, abilities, tasks, and problems, and the task scenarios
used in the heuristic evaluation were based on these personas. Four
personas resulted of a focus group discussion with undergraduate and
graduate students and from interviewing a university librarian. We
then used these personas to create focused task-scenarios for a
heuristic evaluation on the system interface to ensure that it met
users' needs, goals, problems and desires. In this paper, we present
the process that we used to create the personas that led to devise the
task scenarios used in the heuristic evaluation as a follow up study of
the DSpace university repository.
[1] Alan, C. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum: Why high-tech
products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity. Indiana, USA
[2] Blomquist, Å., & Arvola, M. (2002, October). Personas in action:
ethnography in an interaction design team. In Proceedings of the second
Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction (pp. 197-200). ACM.
[3] DalSpace online help document, http://libraries.dal.ca/collection/
dalspace.html, Accessed (2012). Removed for blind review
[4] DSpace, <http://dspace.org>. Accessed (2012).
[5] Kantola, V., Tiitta, S., Mehto, K., & Kankainen, T. (2007, June). Using
dramaturgical methods to gain more dynamic user understanding in
user-centered design. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI
conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 173-182). ACM.
[6] Kuniavsky, M. (2003). Observing the user experience: a practitioner’s
guide to user research. Morgan Kaufmann.
[7] Liu, Y., Osvalder, A. L., & Karlsson, M. (2010). Considering the
importance of user profiles in interface design. ISBN: 978-953-307-084-
1. May.
[8] Miaskiewicz, T., & Kozar, K. A. (2011). Personas and user centered
design: how can Personas benefit product design processes? Design
Studies, 32(5), 417-430.
[9] Mulder, S., and Yaar, Z. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to
Creating and Using Persona for the Web. New Riders, Berkeley, 2007
[10] Muller, M. J., & Carey, K. (2002, April). Design as a minority discipline
in a software company: toward requirements for a community of
practice. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in
computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves (pp. 383-
390). ACM.
[11] Pruitt, J., & Adlin, T. (2006). The Persona Lifecycle: keeping people in
mind throughout product design.
[12] Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003, June). Personas: practice and theory. In
Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences
(pp. 1-15). ACM.
[13] Syariffanor Hisham. 2009. Experimenting with the use of persona in a
focus group discussion with older adults in Malaysia. In Proceedings of
the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human
Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: New York, USA, (pp.333-
336). ACM.
[14] Gibbons, S. (2004). Chapter 3: Benefits of an Institutional Repository.
Library Technology Reports, 40(4), 11-16.
[15] Heery, R., &Anderson, S. (2005). Digital Repositories Review.
Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/
digitalrepositories.
[16] Kahn, M. J., and Prail, A. (1994). Formal usability inspections. In
Nielsen, J., and Mack, R.L. (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods, John
Wiley & Sons, New York, 141–172.
[17] Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure
for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February2003):1-7.
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml.
[18] Lancaster, A. (2004). Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to
Design and Refine User Interfaces. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, 47(4), 335-336.
[19] Nielsen, J. Heuristic evaluation. In Nielsen, J., and Mack, R. L. (Eds.),
Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY,
1994, 25–64.
[20] Tansley, R., Bass, M., Stuve, D., Branschofsky, M., Chudnov, D.,
McClellan, G., & Smith, M. (2003, May). The DSpace institutional
digital repository system: current functionality. In Proceedings of the 3rd
ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (pp. 87-97). IEEE
Computer Society.
[21] Usability Methods: Contextual Task Analysis. (Accessed 2013, April 2):
Usability First. Retrieved from: http://www.usabilityfirst.com/usabilitymethods/
contextual-task-analysis
[22] Wharton, C., Rieman, J., Lewis, C., and Polson, P. (1994). The
Cognitive Walkthrough Method: A Practitioner’s Guide. In Nielsen, J.
and Mack, R. (eds.), Usability inspection methods, John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., New York, 1994, 105-140.
[23] Image courtesy of (Rebecca) adopted from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
[1] Alan, C. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum: Why high-tech
products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity. Indiana, USA
[2] Blomquist, Å., & Arvola, M. (2002, October). Personas in action:
ethnography in an interaction design team. In Proceedings of the second
Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction (pp. 197-200). ACM.
[3] DalSpace online help document, http://libraries.dal.ca/collection/
dalspace.html, Accessed (2012). Removed for blind review
[4] DSpace, <http://dspace.org>. Accessed (2012).
[5] Kantola, V., Tiitta, S., Mehto, K., & Kankainen, T. (2007, June). Using
dramaturgical methods to gain more dynamic user understanding in
user-centered design. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI
conference on Creativity & Cognition (pp. 173-182). ACM.
[6] Kuniavsky, M. (2003). Observing the user experience: a practitioner’s
guide to user research. Morgan Kaufmann.
[7] Liu, Y., Osvalder, A. L., & Karlsson, M. (2010). Considering the
importance of user profiles in interface design. ISBN: 978-953-307-084-
1. May.
[8] Miaskiewicz, T., & Kozar, K. A. (2011). Personas and user centered
design: how can Personas benefit product design processes? Design
Studies, 32(5), 417-430.
[9] Mulder, S., and Yaar, Z. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to
Creating and Using Persona for the Web. New Riders, Berkeley, 2007
[10] Muller, M. J., & Carey, K. (2002, April). Design as a minority discipline
in a software company: toward requirements for a community of
practice. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in
computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves (pp. 383-
390). ACM.
[11] Pruitt, J., & Adlin, T. (2006). The Persona Lifecycle: keeping people in
mind throughout product design.
[12] Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003, June). Personas: practice and theory. In
Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences
(pp. 1-15). ACM.
[13] Syariffanor Hisham. 2009. Experimenting with the use of persona in a
focus group discussion with older adults in Malaysia. In Proceedings of
the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human
Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: New York, USA, (pp.333-
336). ACM.
[14] Gibbons, S. (2004). Chapter 3: Benefits of an Institutional Repository.
Library Technology Reports, 40(4), 11-16.
[15] Heery, R., &Anderson, S. (2005). Digital Repositories Review.
Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/
digitalrepositories.
[16] Kahn, M. J., and Prail, A. (1994). Formal usability inspections. In
Nielsen, J., and Mack, R.L. (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods, John
Wiley & Sons, New York, 141–172.
[17] Lynch, Clifford A. "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure
for Scholarship in the Digital Age" ARL, no. 226 (February2003):1-7.
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml.
[18] Lancaster, A. (2004). Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to
Design and Refine User Interfaces. IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication, 47(4), 335-336.
[19] Nielsen, J. Heuristic evaluation. In Nielsen, J., and Mack, R. L. (Eds.),
Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY,
1994, 25–64.
[20] Tansley, R., Bass, M., Stuve, D., Branschofsky, M., Chudnov, D.,
McClellan, G., & Smith, M. (2003, May). The DSpace institutional
digital repository system: current functionality. In Proceedings of the 3rd
ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (pp. 87-97). IEEE
Computer Society.
[21] Usability Methods: Contextual Task Analysis. (Accessed 2013, April 2):
Usability First. Retrieved from: http://www.usabilityfirst.com/usabilitymethods/
contextual-task-analysis
[22] Wharton, C., Rieman, J., Lewis, C., and Polson, P. (1994). The
Cognitive Walkthrough Method: A Practitioner’s Guide. In Nielsen, J.
and Mack, R. (eds.), Usability inspection methods, John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., New York, 1994, 105-140.
[23] Image courtesy of (Rebecca) adopted from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
@article{"International Journal of Information, Control and Computer Sciences:70860", author = "Maha ALjohani and James Blustein", title = "Personas Help Understand Users’ Needs, Goals and Desires in an Online Institutional Repository", abstract = "Communicating users' needs, goals and problems help
designers and developers overcome challenges faced by end users.
Personas are used to represent end users’ needs. In our research,
creating personas allowed the following questions to be answered:
Who are the potential user groups? What do they want to achieve by
using the service? What are the problems that users face? What
should the service provide to them? To develop realistic personas, we
conducted a focus group discussion with undergraduate and graduate
students and also interviewed a university librarian. The personas
were created to help evaluating the Institutional Repository that is
based on the DSpace system. The profiles helped to communicate
users' needs, abilities, tasks, and problems, and the task scenarios
used in the heuristic evaluation were based on these personas. Four
personas resulted of a focus group discussion with undergraduate and
graduate students and from interviewing a university librarian. We
then used these personas to create focused task-scenarios for a
heuristic evaluation on the system interface to ensure that it met
users' needs, goals, problems and desires. In this paper, we present
the process that we used to create the personas that led to devise the
task scenarios used in the heuristic evaluation as a follow up study of
the DSpace university repository.", keywords = "Heuristic Evaluation, Institutional Repositories, User
Experience, Human Computer Interaction, User Profiles, Personas,
Task Scenarios, Heuristics.", volume = "9", number = "2", pages = "624-8", }