Communicating about users in ICTD: leveraging HCI personas

In this paper, we present two similar projects in which we were concerned with describing end users from a developing region to designers, developers and other stakeholders that were not from the developing region. In one project, we described mobile device users from Kyrgyzstan and in the other we described potential users of home water treatment and storage devices from the Andhra Pradesh region of India. For both projects, we used presentations and analysis methods that were inspired by 'personas' used in human-computer interaction (HCI). An HCI persona is an archetypal character that represents a group of users who share common goals, attitudes, and behaviors when interacting with a product. We found personas were an effective way to organize and communicate survey data; however, in both projects we had to modify the persona method from how it is usually presented in the HCI literature. We believe that our persona creation methods can act as a model for other ICTD researchers when describing their targeted end users.