Cross-cultural personas and peer review for education of information technology students in user-centred conceptual design
Information Technology professionals are often required to conceive a design in a short space of time, in a meeting or in the midst of professional activities. Hence, teaching conceptual design that meets the needs of a user is important for the education of Information Technology students. Yet these concepts are rarely taught. We believe that it is largely due to lack of personnel who can act as users in classroom situations and a lack of resources in assessing conceptual design.
Personas, archetypical users of an application, are tools within User-Centred Design (UCD) methodologies that assist designers to be mindful of the users of the system during the design activities. The concept of personas has been advocated for a long time and it is widely used in industry for design and communication purposes. Researchers have demonstrated that its use within educational environments is viable.
In this thesis, we demonstrate the use of Personas for teaching User Centred Conceptual Design (UCCD) – considering users during the initial stage of design, conceptual design, when the ideas about a product are being formed. Using Personas at the early stage of design helps the designer to be mindful of the users during the design process.
As developing countries are becoming more technologically equipped, the majority of the future producers and consumers of the applications are expected to be from the developing world. Hence, Personas, as design tools, will play a more important role in the design and development of applications by the specialists who may not have direct contact with the users of the application from other culture. A cross-cultural persona conveys a consistent meaning to all stakeholders irrespective of their cultures. Teaching IT students UCD processes and cross-cultural personas are important.
Teaching and assessing conceptual design is a tedious task and requires extra resources. We demonstrate that peer review with a proper design of the question layout and with the help of a rubric are an alternative to staff assessment that can provide quality and timely feedback to students. In our first study (Study One), we devised questionnaires which were used throughout this thesis. Our second study (Study Two) shows that students using a Persona are able to produce artefacts that are equal to or better than those produced using only a prescribed list of requirements.
Study Two also highlights the feasibility of using peer review for assessing conceptual design artefacts. Our third study (Study Three) shows that the students’ engagement and performance when using Personas that represent users with differences in knowledge and cognitive processes as well as being from local and cross-culture are high. This study also highlights the importance of peer review and reinforces that peer review produces better results than staff review in terms of the quality of the assessment and the comments provided to students. Our fourth study (Study Four) demonstrates that if the conceptual design and peer review is not an assessable activity, few students are willing to learn the extra material. Human-computer interaction and User-Centred Design have their roots in psychology (e.g. (Carroll 1997, Norman and Draper 1986)). The students studying in the Department of Psychology participated in our fifth study (Study Five). We demonstrated that when our teaching methods are applied to a group of students who in the course of their studies were not taught design concepts, UCD and persona, they were able to learn the concepts and produce valid results. Thus the processes and procedures we used in our study are suitable in learning and teaching UCCD.
