Child-persona: How to Bring them to Reality?

Abstract

The purpose of the investigation described in this article is the creation of a Persona questionnaire, which will be used as reference to design a political educational game for children. There are several methodological strategies for the development of adult- based Personas that are used in information systems. However, there is little information on how to create Personas for systems used by children. Some questions we addressed in this context are: What kind of items can best characterize a child's lifestyle, needs, frustrations, and expectations? How to design questions in order to gather data efficiently? A three-phase methodology was designed to answer these issues: 1) Semi-structured interviews to access the most important aspects of lifestyle, needs, frustrations and expectations; 2) Creation and oral administration of a questionnaire aimed at verifying children's difficulties in answering questions; 3) Questionnaire review and application in a classroom situation with a different set of children. The results enable the development of a questionnaire focused on the child's characteristics. In the next phase of this study, this questionnaire will be applied to a sample of 500 children to create child-Personas for a political game.