Developing Personas for Use in the Design of Cryospheric Applications

Ann Windnagel(1), Deann Miller(2), Kara Gergely(3)

Abstract
As with any type of application design, understanding the user and what their goals and needs are is one of the cornerstones of creating a good, effective product. The same holds true for designing applications for scientific purposes. In industry and marketing, personas have become an invaluable tool for determining user requirements and thought patterns since the 1990’s. A persona is an archetypal user based on research and interviews done with real users that help the development team identify and understand their user base. In a sense, a Persona is a kind of user model that represents a particular type of user. We will discuss how personas were developed for an application that will serve cryospheric data sets to users. The full life cycle of a persona from concept to data gathering to completion will be discussed in addition to the benefits of persona driven design and its applications.