UCLIC, University College London, Malet Place Engineering Building 8th Floor, Malet Place, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Appl Ergon. 2014 Jul;45(4):1097-105. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2014.01.010. Epub 2014 Feb 8.
Representations of archetypal users (personas) have been advocated as a way to avoid designing in isolation. They allow communication of user needs and orient teams towards user experience. One of the challenges for developers of interactive medical devices is that most devices are used by a wide variety of people, and that developers have limited access to those people; personas have the potential to make developers more aware of who they are designing for. But this raises the question of whether it is possible to deliver useful, valid personas of interactive medical device users. The aim of this research was to develop and test a rigorous, empirically grounded process of constructing personas, with the objective of reflecting on that process. Many challenges were encountered: we found that directly linking the personas to a user population was not possible and although personas were a useful tool for supporting communication and elicitation across disciplines, it was hard to make them representative when picking details that were relevant and checking accuracy. Checking the content resulted in disparate, possibly incommensurable, views. Despite this, the personas proved useful in supporting the transfer of knowledge across professional perspectives.
代表性用户（人物角色）的表示法已被提倡作为一种避免孤立设计的方法。它们允许传达用户需求，并使团队面向用户体验。交互式医疗设备的开发人员面临的挑战之一是，大多数设备都被各种各样的人使用，而开发人员对这些人只有有限的了解；人物角色有可能使开发人员更加清楚他们是为谁设计的。但是，这就提出了一个问题，即是否有可能为交互式医疗设备用户提供有用且有效的人物角色。本研究的目的是开发和测试一种严格的、基于经验的人物角色构建过程，以反思该过程。遇到了许多挑战：我们发现，直接将人物角色与用户群体联系起来是不可能的，尽管人物角色对于支持跨学科的沟通和启发是有用的工具，但在选择相关的细节并检查准确性时，很难使它们具有代表性。检查内容会导致不同的、可能无法比较的观点。尽管如此，这些人物角色在支持跨专业视角的知识转移方面还是很有用的。
