Communicating User Experience: "Wicked" Problems, Patchwork Personas, and the ICTD Project Lifecycle

Research in the ICT4D field implicates lack of user-centered design in the high rate of ICTD project failure. The field of user experience UX offers potentially fruitful approaches for user-centered design. In the ICTD context, these principles and methods clash with the triple constraints of project management time, scope and funding. This paper introduces the user persona from UX design as a powerful tool for considering the user's perspective within resource-constrained ICTD projects. Although personas appear simple, they introduce complex communicative affordances, pragmatic benefits, and risks to ICTD projects. A brief conclusion revisits the larger problem of ICTD project failure, and considers the potential role of personas in addressing this problem.

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