Developing and Validating Personas in E-Commerce: A Heuristic Approach
A multi-method persona development process in a large e-commerce business is described. Personas are fictional representations of customers that describe typical user attributes to facilitate a user-centered approach in interaction design. In the current paper, persona attributes were derived from various data sources, such as stakeholder interviews, user tests and interviews, data mining, customer surveys, and ethnographic (direct observation and diary studies) research. The heuristic approach of using these data sources conjointly allowed for an early validation of relevant persona dimensions.