SLR on Children and Elderly Persona

Software is usually developed with general users in mind. However, it is very unlikely that people of different ages will perceive software in the same way. Children as well as elderly people may need to interact quite differently with the same software application.

Technology adoption for elderly users has been studied quite extensively in the past. More limited research has been conducted concerning children’s interaction with software. A consolidated list of the facets that influence their interaction with software as well as the characteristics that makes them different from the general user population is unavailable.

We conducted a systematic literature review on research with children and elderly users using personas with the aim to identify key unique characteristics of these user groups and the facets that influence their interaction with software systems.

A persona is a fictitious character created to represent users of a system and provides a rich description about the user groups it represents. We selected articles that involved persona, to obtain a better understanding of these particular user groups.

Our study findings highlight several facets that are unique about elders and children user groups. We developed a tool with different descriptions of those facets collected from our review. We collected feedback on the tool from experts and adjusted the tool accordingly.

Persona Tool:

https://age-gender-persona.w3spaces.com/

Investigators

Dr Tanjila Kanij, Dr Anuradha Madugalla, Prof John Gundy