On the Creation of a Persona to Support the Development of Technologies for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

When developing technologies for persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) there are multiple aspects posing challenges to the community. First of all, there are several viewpoints at stake, from the targeted person to family and caretakers, needing careful consideration and yielding conflicting interests and motivations that need to be considered. Second, design and development teams often include people with a very diverse background, from psychologists to software engineers, who need to be able to fully communicate their knowledge and ideas regarding the users, and understand the different team viewpoints towards the best possible outcome. In this context, we argue that Personas (and in particular, families of Personas) can be a powerful tool to tackle these challenges. As a first stage of our work, we present the methods considered for the creation of a Persona for a 10 years old kid with ASD along with its full description. At this stage, the Persona has been evaluated by a panel of experts and was considered in the design of a first application prototype for children with ASD.