Persona as a Tool to Involving Human in Agile Methods: Contributions from HCI and Marketing

Abstract

Human centricity refers to the active involvement in the overall product lifecycle of different human actors including end-users, stakeholders and providers. Persona is one of the different tools that exist for human centricity. While marketing is the original domain in which persona was introduced, this technique has also been widely used in user-centered design (UCD) design. In these two perceptions, persona has demonstrated its potential as an efficient tool for grouping the users or customers and focusing on user or customer needs, goals and behavior. A segmentation technique is generally used with persona in order to group individual users according to their common features, identifying within these groups those that represent a pattern of human behavior. This paper investigates how persona has been used to improve the usability in the agile development domain, while studying which contributions from marketing and HCI have enriched persona in this agile context.