How have personas been used in successful library web design?

Question

"Personas" are detailed research-based profiles of typical or target users of a web site, created so that people building the site build it for those people, with their particular needs and goals, instead of just some generic average bunch of users. Each persona has a name, age, and all other personal details, so instead of saying "people want to do X" one would say "Maria wants to do X, because ..."

There's been discussion at the UX SE about them, for example What research methods can I use to create personas?. And there are web sites such as Practical Personas: The User is Always Right.

Library users have particular sets of needs (research for an assignment, finding three peer-reviewed articles, citing references properly, etc.) and in academic libraries fall naturally into certain categories (undergraduate/graduate/faculty, science/business/arts/humanities, etc.). It seems like personas would work well for improving library web design.

Have they? I am interested in knowing:

• what types of personas were made (particularly in an academic library context)
• what research was used to create them
• how they were used during user experience work (for example, did you look at the catalogue and say, "Maria needs to get this article on the reading list her prof sent"?)

A LITA presentation, Persona Most Grata: Invoking the User from Data to Design talks about library applications of personas, giving four examples and answering some of my first two questions, but being slides there isn't much supplementary helpful information.

Answer 1

I did a quick search in LISTA and this was the best I could come up with:

Cunningham, H. (2005). Designing a web site for one imaginary persona that reflects the needs of many. Computers In Libraries, 25(9), 15-19.

To answer your specific questions:

• Study seems odd in that observations were compiled into just two personas, a Cindy representing students and a Matthew for faculty. Cindy was the primary persona. Nice quote "Cindy is a neophyte. She does not understand library jargon nor the library's reporting structure. She only wants to quickly find a few scholarly articles for her bioethics paper and doesn't know why her professor keeps stressing that sources must be scholarly."
• They used library user surveys, anecdotes, a student survey, and experience staffing the reference desk. A multi-pronged but I gather pretty informal agglomeration of details.
• They used Cindy's narrow focus to consolidate several similar links to give her a more direct path to articles. Much link text was changed to be more plain or targeted ("scholarly articles") language.

See Also

White, L. (2010). Usability Testing Trends in Library Services. Intercom, 57(1), 9-11.

Haller, T. (2011). An Information Architecture Story: Reshaping www.plainlanguage.gov to Meet Changed Needs. Bulletin Of The American Society For Information Science & Technology, 37(6), 10-15.

(not about a library site but seemed close enough to be worth mentioning)