Co-creation of value for user experiences Chapter | 5 73when use. It is important to translate the user mental model to the design. There
are several design approaches that help us to leverage users’ mental models in
creating UXs that truly address their needs. One of the approaches is to use the
user personas method (Ballav, 2016).
5.5.6.1 User Personas
According to O’Connor (2011), a persona represents a cluster of users who
exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technol-
ogy or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like.
Behaviors, attitudes, and motivations are common to a ”type“ regardless of age,
gender, education, and other typical demographics. Persona helps the designer
to relate to people’s different mindsets; to empathize with the attitudes of poten-
tial users; to understand users’ context, behaviors, attitudes, needs, challenges,
pain points, goals, and motivations. It also spans across demographics.
The following guidelines can be used to obtain our personas that support the
stakeholders of the ITS. First, we conduct UR by asking the following ques-
tions: Who are our target users and why are they using the system? We also need
to find out what are their assumptions, behavior, and expectations of the system.
Second, we need to condense the research and look for themes/characteristics
that are specific, relevant, and universal to the system and its users. Third. we
conduct brainstorming to organize elements into persona groups that represent
the target users. Fourth, the persona groups need to be combined and prioritized,
they need to be separated into primary, secondary, and, if necessary, comple-
mentary categories. We should have roughly three to five personas and their
identified characteristics. Fifth, we must make the personas visible by descript-
ing each of background, motivations, and expectations.
5.5.7 Develop conceptual model
Churchill (2007) defined a conceptual model as a particular kind of a learn-
ing object. According to him, a conceptual model is an interactive and visual
representation designed to depict a concept or several connected concepts and
support conceptual learning through multimedia and processes of manipulation
and interrogation of represented properties and relationships. According to Nor-
man (1983) conceptual model is a representation of a target system designed to
serve as a tool for understanding or teaching. Mayer (1989) describes a concep-
tual model as a representation designed for teaching and learning purposes and
writes that such a representation “highlights the major objects and actions in a
system as well as the causal relations among them” (p. 43).
The conceptual model is what is given to the users by the designer for the
system. It is the interface of the system that users interact with. The interface of
the system that designer has developed communicates the conceptual model of
the product. It is important to design the right conceptual model. The reason is
that if the product’s conceptual model does not match the user’s mental model,