Understanding the users' needs is important for designing an application that provides a good usage experience. One can use design thinking (DT) to help identify those needs. Persona is a technique used in DT to support the requirements elicitation by describing user profiles. Nevertheless, the persona descriptions created using a traditional template may include many details about the users that are not relevant to the application design. To overcome this limitation, the authors proposed the PATHY technique to guide software engineers in creating and describing more useful personas, i.e. personas with information that is more relevant to the application design. They conducted an experiment to compare PATHY to another persona-based technique which uses a traditional template and also supports the representation of the application's requirements. In this study, they assessed which of the two techniques helps to generate descriptions of personas that are more focused on potential requirements to consider in the design of the application. In addition, they analysed the efficiency of the techniques and the participants' perception of use. The results showed that PATHY generated more relevant characteristics for the application design than the technique that follows the traditional description. The PATHY was also more efficient for creating personas.

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Technique for representing requirements using personas: a controlled experiment

References

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