TY - JOUR
T1 - Persona preparedness
T2 - a survey instrument for measuring the organizational readiness for deploying personas
AU - Salminen, joni
AU - Nielsen, Lene
AU - Bahlouh, Malik
AU - Sørensen, Rasmus Grønlund
AU - Santos, João M.
AU - Jung, Soon-Gyo
AU - Jansen, Bernard J.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - User-centric design within organizations is crucial for developing information technology that offers optimal usability and user experience. Personas are a central user-centered design technique that puts people before technology and helps decision makers understand the needs and wants of the end-user segments of their products, systems, and services. However, it is not clear how ready organizations are to adopt persona thinking. To address these concerns, we develop and validate the Persona Readiness Scale (PRS), a survey instrument to measure organizational readiness for personas. After a 12-person qualitative pilot study, the PRS was administered to 372 professionals across different industries to examine its reliability and validity, including 125 for exploratory factor analysis and 247 for confirmatory factor analysis. The confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit with five dimensions: Culture readiness, Knowledge readiness, Data and systems readiness, Capability readiness, and Goal readiness. Higher persona readiness is positively associated with the respondents’ evaluations of successful persona projects. Organizations can apply the resulting 18-item scale to identify areas of improvement before initiating costly persona projects towards the overarching goal of user-centric product development. Located at the cross-section of information systems and human–computer interaction, our research provides a valuable instrument for organizations wanting to leverage personas towards more user-centric and empathetic decision making about users.
AB - User-centric design within organizations is crucial for developing information technology that offers optimal usability and user experience. Personas are a central user-centered design technique that puts people before technology and helps decision makers understand the needs and wants of the end-user segments of their products, systems, and services. However, it is not clear how ready organizations are to adopt persona thinking. To address these concerns, we develop and validate the Persona Readiness Scale (PRS), a survey instrument to measure organizational readiness for personas. After a 12-person qualitative pilot study, the PRS was administered to 372 professionals across different industries to examine its reliability and validity, including 125 for exploratory factor analysis and 247 for confirmatory factor analysis. The confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit with five dimensions: Culture readiness, Knowledge readiness, Data and systems readiness, Capability readiness, and Goal readiness. Higher persona readiness is positively associated with the respondents’ evaluations of successful persona projects. Organizations can apply the resulting 18-item scale to identify areas of improvement before initiating costly persona projects towards the overarching goal of user-centric product development. Located at the cross-section of information systems and human–computer interaction, our research provides a valuable instrument for organizations wanting to leverage personas towards more user-centric and empathetic decision making about users.
KW - user empathy
KW - survey instrument
KW - personas
KW - human-centered IT
KW - Human Computer Interaction
KW - user empathy
KW - survey instrument
KW - personas
KW - human-centered IT
KW - Human Computer Interaction
U2 - 10.1007/s10799-022-00373-9
DO - 10.1007/s10799-022-00373-9
M3 - Journal article
JO - Information Technology and Management
JF - Information Technology and Management
ER -