Audiences involved, imagined, and invoked: trends in user-centered interactive information design

Practitioners in information architecture and interaction design have begun to use elaborate procedures for creating and communicating "personas," realistically detailed psychographic profiles of archetypal users. Design teams collaboratively invent these vivid fictional characters based on market segmentation data and user research. Teams strive to capture the product-related needs and goals of personas in condensed narratives called "scenarios" that depict the personas interacting with the product to achieve a particular goal. Personas and scenarios have only recently entered the conceptual vocabulary of professional communication. At present, they remain on the margins of our knowledge domain, in the contact zone with the discourse of information architects and interaction designers. This paper illustrates and explains the use of personas and scenarios for user and task analysis, glosses the origin and evolution of these methods, reviews the most recent communications about them by prominent interaction design and usability professionals, and links them to theorizing about the writer-reader relationship in the scholarship of rhetoric, composition, and professional communication. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how the new storytelling approaches to user and task analysis affect theory, teaching, research, and practice in professional communication.