Integrating the Personas Technique into the Product Configuration

To product development and design, confirming user´s preference characteristics has been the most primary problem. Persona is a very useful tool of requirement engineering to gather data about users, but seems seldom apply to industrial design. In this paper, a method of persona-driven analysis and the concept of product design method is proposed. It focus on extracting user´s role characteristics and preferences by empirical data and then build a Product Configuration and design system construction with a series of criteria data and mapping rules based on persona. First, the data of product information and user preferences will be collected by user interview and marketing investigation. Second, the representative characteristics will be extracted as role attributes by rough set and conjoint analysis , and templates of typical user´s characteristics, product preference attributes, mapping rules will be established. Based on these templates, a system of product design and configuration will be constructed which facilitated to search, match, reuse the information corresponding to similarly user template. Finally, a case was given to illustrate the method.