• DOI:10.18293/SEKE2015-152
• Corpus ID: 18497665

Designing Personas with Empathy Map

@inproceedings{Ferreira2015DesigningPW,
  title={Designing Personas with Empathy Map},
  author={Bruna Moraes Ferreira and Williamson Alison Freitas Silva and Edson Oliveira and Tayana Uchoa Conte},
  booktitle={International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering},
  year={2015}
}

• B. Ferreira, W. Silva, +1 author T. Conte
• Published in
  International Conference on…
  1 July 2015
• Computer Science

A software product's acceptance depends on the user experience that it provides to its users. The software product must meet the user needs, and one way to understand those needs is through creation of Personas. The Personas technique allows describing the users' characteristics, goals and skills. The Empathy Map (EM) method can be used to describe personas. The EM's goal is to create a degree of empathy with the user so the product developing team starts to understand more deeply the users and become more aware of their real needs. To assess the EM effects on the creation of personas, we conducted a feasibility study with 20 subjects. Initially, the subjects learned how to describe personas in textual form. After that, they applied the EM to create personas. After using the EM, the subjects answered a questionnaire about their perceptions regarding the EM's ease of use and its usefulness. The results showed that majority of subjects considered EM useful and easy to create personas. Furthermore, this majority also said that they would use the EM for the creation of personas again. This paper presents the results of a feasibility study where the EM is employed for the creation of personas. In this study, we evaluated the perception of the subjects regarding to ease of use and usefulness of the EM for the creation of personas. Through the analysis of the results it was possible to obtain the user"s perception regarding the use of EM. In addition we identified improvement suggestions for the Empathy Map. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the User Experience, Personas and Empathy Map concepts. Section III details the feasibility study, followed by our results in Section IV. The Section V shows the validity threats of the feasibility study. Finally, conclusions and comments on future work are given in Section VI.