Personas in action

Alan Cooper's view on interaction design is both appealing and provoking since it avoids problems of involving users by simply excluding them. The users are instead represented by an archetype of a user, called persona. This paper reports a twelve-week participant observation in an interaction design team with the purpose of learning what really goes on in a design team when they implement personas in their process. On the surface it seemed like they used personas, but our analysis show how they had difficulties in using them and encountered problems when trying to imagine the user. We furthermore describe and discuss how the design team tried to involve users in order to compensate for their problems. It is concluded that it is not enough for the design team, and particularly not for the interaction designers, to have the know-how of using the method. They also have to integrate it with existing knowledge and practices in order to feel at home with it and use it efficiently.