Personas and Identity: Looking at Multiple Identities to Inform the Construction of Personas

Personas are valuable tools to help designers get to know their users and adopt their perspectives. Yet people are complex and multiple identities have to be considered in their interplay to account for a comprehensive representation – otherwise, personas might be superficial and prone to activate stereotypes. Therefore, the way users' identities are presented in a limited set of personas is crucial to account for diversity and highlight facets which otherwise would go unnoticed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to the development of personas informed by social identity theory. The effectiveness of this approach is investigated in a qualitative study in the context of the design process for an e-learning platform for women in tech. The results suggest that considering multiple identities in the construction of personas adds value when designing technologies.