Living Persona Technique applied to HCI Education

This paper aims to present an experience report on a new pedagogical technique which applies to the teaching of interactive systems: the Living Persona technique. First, we review the well-known technique of Persona that is used in some processes of realization of interactive systems. In this technique, a Persona represents an archetype of the users interacting in the system to be produced. From this Persona technique, we define the Living Persona one. Within the framework of practical work students have to specify, an interactive system, this technique of Living Persona consists in making the teacher play the role of a representative of the contracting authority, who is also potentially a future user of the system to be specified. As a consequence, during his meetings with the students, the teacher has to adopt a behavior in compliance with the state of mind of the users' archetype defined by the Persona. Then we present a pedagogical scenario which integrates this Living Persona technique and we apply it to a practical work in which the students must produce an interactive system specification using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We show through a classroom experience that the practical work set up provides students with work situations close to professional realities. We evaluate the level of interactions between students and teacher and the extent to which this pedagogy influences some students behaviors. Finally, the continuation of our research is highlighted.