Personas: Moving Beyond Role-Based Requirements Engineering

A primary vehicle for understanding the user in the context of the requirements for a system has been the role. For example, the role is captured through the use of actors in the use case diagram and use case descriptions. Recently, personas have been used in conjunction with scenarios in participatory design to go deeper into examining the different types of people who could play a role. A persona is an archetype of a fictional user representing a specific group of typical users. This paper expands the use of personas to scenario-based requirements engineering. Personas and scenarios are being used together for specifying requirements at Microsoft. The result of this combination has been a more comprehensive understanding of the target customers' behaviors to drive and refine our scenarios and subsequently our product development.