Proposing Co-Design of Personas as a Method to Heighten Validity and Engage Users: A Case from Higher Education

Involving Users In Persona Design: Three Cases

Within Higher Education, persona design has been used for the last ten years, primarily in relation to the development of digital solutions for students: For instance, an academic career management system (Borges, 2012), a learning management system and anti-plagiarism software (Dantin, 2005), and app for second language acquisition (Pemberton et al., 2009) and in relation to mobile learning (Rebaque-Rivas et al., 2010). Persona design has also been used in connection to educational development (Yström et al., 2010) and for developing a website about e-learning for teachers (Gaiser et al., 2006; Panke et al., 2007). However, involving users directly in the persona design process is not often done, neither in a Higher Education context nor elsewhere, and only a few instances have been reported (Cabrero, 2014). In this section, we will present three cases where users have participated in creating personas (one set in Higher Education, two in other contexts).