Persona ontology for user centred design professionals

The design of software applications is a multistage creative process. User Centred Design (UCD) is a methodology used to develop applications that consider the goals of the users as a primary requirement. The use of personas, archetypical users, in UCD is well established in the software industry. Personas may take various forms: personas, mash-up personas, incomplete personas and unspoken personas. The use of personas increases as the design progresses through stages. Personas are used to facilitate the design of applications focusing on target users and to communicate with stakeholders. Users' tasks of consuming the information from an application or web browser are cognitively demanding. It is expected that if the users' profile matches the application's personas, the users will find the application cognitively less demanding. Different techniques have been used to author personas with alternative media and varying information content, to such an extent that there is now a need to define the ontology of personas. This ontology would allow personas with consistent meanings to be shared across the design, development, test, marketing and sales teams; and would allow persona attributes and properties to be mapped to other design and development tools, such as actors, use cases and domain models. In this paper we explore the research question: how can we evaluate the usefulness of personas in software design, development, testing, communication and training? Through five case studies in various Australian industries, we provide insights into the use of personas in various phases of design, development, testing and training. We present a conceptual design of persona ontology. We propose the design of a persona ontology framework which represents personas in a hierarchical, multidimensional structure. We present a Holistic Persona with five dimensions: Factual, Personality, Intelligent, Knowledge and Cognitive Process Dimensions. The Holistic Persona at the top level is an abstract persona with generic properties and attributes.