Child-Generated Personas to Aid Design across Cultures

Abstract

Designers frequently use personas to model potential users, but these personas need to be accurate portrayals of people. With personas needed to facilitate a cross-cultural participatory design project, it was recognized that the personas needed to not only describe children appropriately, but also capture differences in behaviours between cultures. 56 children aged 7-10 in the UK and India participated in the creation of personas of elementary school children, describing aspects such as school life, family life and technology use. A tool developed to evaluate personas demonstrated that both sets of children could individually create plausible personas, while content analysis of the personas demonstrated that children focused on behavioural and activity-based narratives that were similar between the two groups, with only limited cultural differences identified. The findings suggest that child-generated personas can be a viable method in the design process, and may offer insights that aid cross-cultural design.