Lene Nielsen

Lene Nielsen
IT University of Copenhagen · Business IT

PhD

About

80
Publications
48,621
Reads
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1,669
Citations
Introduction
Lene Nielsen currently works at the department of Busines IT, IT University of Copenhagen. Lene does research in Human-computer Interaction and Information Systems (Business Informatics). Her current project is 'Design of Health Care Devices within Epilepsy .'
Additional affiliations
August 2001 - June 2006
Copenhagen Business School
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (80)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This reflective paper proposes a research agenda that investigates and questions how and if we need to assess the service design tools and their usability in the context of organisations’ design maturity. Maps and tool in the service design toolbox are perceived as straightforward by some organisations, however for organisations with low service de...
Chapter
This workshop will explore and discuss how Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as a field of knowledge and practice can contribute to develop platforms for digital democracy and participation. These issues are mainly seen at two levels: (1) the optimal design of the digital environment of citizen participation platforms, and (2) explore how HCI can co...
Conference Paper
Although personas have been applied for two decades, not much is known about why a designer chooses a specific persona for a given design task. This question matters because if designers prefer one persona over another, then the needs and attributes of that persona would be favored in the design process, resulting in possible “blind spots” and bias...
Article
Full-text available
Studies in human-computer interaction recommend creating fewer than ten personas, based on stakeholders’ limitations to cognitively process and use personas. However, no existing studies offer empirical support for having fewer rather than more personas. Investigating this matter, thirty-seven participants interacted with five and fifteen personas...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Personas represent distinct user types. However, while online user data can be demographically and behaviorally heterogeneous, most studies generate less than ten personas, regardless of how heterogeneous the data is. Because all persona creation efforts need to assign a number of personas to create, assigning this number evokes a fundamental quest...
Article
Full-text available
User-centric design within organizations is crucial for developing information technology that offers optimal usability and user experience. Personas are a central user-centered design technique that puts people before technology and helps decision makers understand the needs and wants of the end-user segments of their products, systems, and servic...
Conference Paper
Personas has evolved since Alan Cooper coined the term in 1999, moving into new domains, new ways of collecting data, and with novel ways of presenting the persona profiles. From the beginning, personas was linked to software design, expressing the need for empathy with end-users. This is still the case today, but we want to show how this is execut...
Article
Background: Personas are a technique for enhanced understanding of users and customers to improve the user-centered design of systems and products. Their creation can be categorized using three persona creation methodologies: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods. Despite the apparent differences in these methodologies, no previous review ha...
Article
Background: Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (ta-VNS) is a new non-invasive technique developed as treatment option for drug resistant epilepsy. A few studies have been carried out showing that the efficacy and tolerability of ta-VNS is comparable with traditional implanted VNS but the feasibility of the therapy has been poorly des...
Chapter
Full-text available
Personas is a suggested method to extend IT professionals' understanding of users and users’ needs. A common advantage expressed is that personas extend the IT professionals’ empathy for the users, but a disadvantage is that personas are typically defined at the start of a software project and gradually are forgotten, since there is little referenc...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper describes a one-day INTERACT 2021 workshop on remote testing with users as participants. Remote user testing has been around since the mid-nineties, but the Covid-19 pandemic has boosted the interest in remote working in general and thus also remote testing. The workshop aim is to present and discuss the current state-of-the-art of remot...
Chapter
In a user experiment, we tried out a novel data collection approach consisting of combining surveys with the think aloud method. We coin the phrase “think-aloud survey method”, where participants think-aloud while completing a questionnaire. We analyzed the transcripts and found that the think aloud survey provides deeper insights into the reasonin...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
User studies have found persona application challenging. We argue that a potential reason for the challenges is the organization's readiness to apply personas. This research reports the on-going effort of developing the Persona Readiness Scale, a survey instrument for organizations’ readiness for personas. The scale involves twenty-two items from s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Practitioners in user-centric industries have increasingly recognized the applicability of personas. However, the methods used to create personas in different domains remain inconsistent and unsystematic. We analyzed 51 studies focused on designing personas for professional purposes and find the practice most prevalent in the user experience (UX) d...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Persona is a technique for enhancing user understanding and improving the user-centered design of digital products. Persona creation has traditionally been divided into Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods approaches. However, no literature systematically contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. We review the literature t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The aim of this workshop is to engage in co-design of personas to explore the interplay of autonomous technologies with user experience and engagement. Automating a process that is embedded into people's everyday lives and activities will surely impact their experience. In a time where there is strong push towards more and more automation in our da...
Chapter
Full-text available
Following the proliferation of personified big data and data science algorithms, data-driven user personas (DDPs) are becoming more common in persona design. However, the DDP templates are seemingly diverse and fragmented, prompting a need for a synthesis of the information included in these personas. Analyzing 31 templates for DDPs, we find that D...
Chapter
This research paper presents the design process of creating a user persona of Indian mothers of preterm neonates. Many of these preterm neonates require hospitalization in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), leading to mental stress for mothers and their families. The main objective of mother’s persona is to understand the mother behavior and pr...
Chapter
When preparing persona descriptions, you need to keep in mind that they must be usable for the many different professional competencies that are involved in a project. This could be: The management group where the descriptions are used for strategic decisions about present and potential users. The project group who uses the personas for general dec...
Chapter
In recent years, discussions about interface design and evaluation methods have brought cultural aspects in play, and this goes for personas too. Organisations are developing personas for global markets, but the cultural issues of personas are not clearly defined, and there is very little information on how to account for cultural differences when...
Chapter
You are now reading the second edition of Personas—User Focused Design. Since the first edition, I have done a lot more research, been manager of Center for Persona Research and Application, closed the centre, coached a lot of companies, been in connection with Automated Persona Generation, and experienced how difficult it is to do international pe...
Chapter
Whether you work with user journeys, user stories, use cases, scenarios, wire frames, or any other tool that helps you imagine a future system or product, your aim is to understand how different people are going to interact with it.
Chapter
Your persona project is well underway, and the descriptions are used for: ideation, supporting dialogue, recruiting users for product tests, and communicating with the users etc. You now have to consider how to, in the long run, get the method to maintain focus, what should happen if you obtain new knowledge about the users, when to update informat...
Chapter
One of the most critical criteria for well-founded personas is sound material. When you have concluded step 1, and the relevant data is collected, you need to work out what differentiates the users to find both the number of personas and what constitutes their differences. Step 2 ‘You Form a Hypothesis’ describes how you form the first analysis of...
Chapter
The starting point when working with personas is knowledge about the users. Step 1: Collection of data covers how you get information about the users, what data is, and how you analyse the data. These are some of the questions you must deal with when designing surveys. You must also consider, whether the data material is of sufficient quality to de...
Chapter
To manage software development, many companies have over the past 20 years been applying agile processes. The waterfall model contains an iterative process, but makes it difficult to change during development, as it defines the final product from the beginning.
Book
People relate to other people, not to simplified types or segments. This is the concept that underpins this book. Personas, a user centered design methodology, covers topics from interaction design within IT, through to issues surrounding product design, communication, and marketing. Project developers need to understand how users approach their pr...
Article
Full-text available
Design personas have, since their origins in the late 1990s, been recognised as a design tool to foster ideation and empathy with different user groups. The method originates from software development and has since its instigation become a widespread method adopted in many design disciplines and processes, such as innovation and ideation of IT prod...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Agile project management processes (Agile) such as Scrum, DSDM, XP and Kanban, have become a de facto standard for software development practice. The context of Agile strongly affects the possibilities of IT professionals to conduct UX activities in their software development. In this workshop we aim to address successes, challenges and best practi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A highly debated topic within recent literature in HCI is the integration of UX activities into agile development. While we acknowledge the question of integration to be one of the main challenges for UX professionals, this seems to have received traction and is heading closer towards a resolution. We believe the time is right for gaining an in-dep...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this research, we investigate if and how more photos than a single headshot can heighten the level of information provided by persona profiles. We conduct eye-tracking experiments and qualitative interviews with variations in the photos: a single headshot, a headshot and images of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with pictures o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
To more effectively convey relevant information to end users of persona profiles, we conducted a user study consisting of 29 participants engaging with three persona layout treatments. We were interested in confusion engendered by the treatments on the participants, and conducted a within-subjects study in the actual work environment, using eye-tra...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
One of the reasons for using personas is to align user understandings across project teams and sites. As part of a larger persona study, at Al Jazeera English (AJE), we conducted 16 qualitative interviews with media producers, the end users of persona descriptions. We asked the participants about their understanding of a typical AJE media consumer,...
Conference Paper
Digital devices play an important role in medical treatment and will in the future play a larger role in connection to cures of health-related issues. Traditionally medicine has been tested by clinical double blind, randomized trials to document the efficacy and safety profile. When it comes to the use of digital devices in treatments the protocols...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We develop a methodology for persona generation using real time social media data for the distribution of products via online platforms. From a large social media account containing more than 30 million interactions from users from 181 countries engaging with more than 4,200 digital products produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate th...
Article
Full-text available
Personas have become a popular method in new product development. Personas have traditionally, and are still, primarily created to represent users from a single national culture at a time during the design process. This, however, is unsatisfactory for companies operating on a global market as they show an increasing interest in international person...
Conference Paper
In today’s globalized world, it is increasingly important for companies to gain knowledge about international markets and to understand the differences and similarities between international users. As a result, international user studies have become more common. However, they still pose a challenge for most companies. In this paper, we present the...
Article
Full-text available
The persona method is gaining widespread use and support. Many researchers have reported from single cases and from novel domains of how they have used the method. However the way companies and design groups describe personas has not been the focus of attention. This paper analyses 47 descriptions from 13 companies and compare these to an analysis...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Personas is a technique that supports designing and engineering interactive systems with the focus on the end-users. This paper reports from a case study, where we interviewed four software developers about their usage of personas in software development practice. The purpose of was to identify the practices of personas development in the software...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The persona method is gaining widespread use and support. Many researchers have reported from single cases and novel domains how they have used the method. Few have conducted literature studies in order to identify and discuss the different understandings of the method. Fewer still have reported on ethnographic studies of practice. This paper falls...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The persona method is widely used and commonly described both in scientific literature and in case-based blogs. Most often the descriptions point to a local context with local user groups and it is difficult to find writings on use of the method in an international context and in globally distributed teams. This paper reports from a qualitative stu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The method of personas is gaining widespread use, not only within IT systems development, but also in areas such as architecture, marketing, and product development. Personas are descriptions of fictitious users derived from on qualitative and/or quantitative data. The persona method helps designers and design teams to engage in the users during th...
Chapter
Before personas and situations really can be used to create something new, they have to be distributed to all who may use them, also to management and marketing, even if they were not associated with the project as such. Likewise, it is a good idea to think of how external partners and future employees will get access to the descriptions. Step 8: Y...
Chapter
One of the most important criteria for well-founded personas is that the material is sound. When step 1 is concluded and the relevant data collected, we need to work out what differentiates the users so that we can find both the number of personas and what constitutes their differences. Hopefully we will end up with descriptions like Karina, Jesper...
Chapter
International studies have shown that there are a number of areas that affect the success of the method (Browne 2011). Some companies do not want to use the method because they think that their segmentation tools can achieve the same result. In other companies, the data that creates the foundation of the persona descriptions is inadequate for any s...
Chapter
Step 3: Everyone accept the hypothesis is about whether you can confirm that the analysis is true and how you can use this next step to get as many as possible to feel ownership. The scientific designation of the process to get the analysis accepted is verification. Verification means confirmation, and in this case, it is about both asking the ques...
Chapter
The starting point when working with personas is knowledge about the users. Step 1: Collection of data is about how you obtain data about the users, what data is, and how you treat the data. When you are designing surveys, these are questions that you have to deal with as well as having to consider whether the data material is of a sufficient quali...
Chapter
When I began working with personas and read the first descriptions, I was surprised at the way the writers described other people. It was obvious that not much thought had gone into how the reader would perceive the person or what understanding the reader should get of the person. In some descriptions I had, as reader, the feeling that more effort...
Chapter
How does something new look? The persona process is now at a point where you can begin to envision a future product. This is done by stories of how a user or customer might use a product. These stories are called scenarios and are the focal point of the entire persona method. It is in this step you imagine things that do not as of yet exist, and it...
Chapter
The persona project is well underway; the descriptions are used for idea development to create new products, to support dialogue, to recruit users for test of product drafts, and to communicate with the users. But how long will the method be able to maintain focus? What happens if we get new knowledge about the users? And when is it time to get the...
Chapter
People relate to other people, not to simplified types or segments. This is the concept that underpins this book. Personas, a user centered design methodology covers topics from interaction design within IT, through to issues surrounding product design, communication, and marketing. Project developers need to understand how users approach their pro...
Chapter
When developing a user-focused design, the simplest structure for the story about user and interactions is a movement from a beginning, through a middle, to an end (Cobley 2001). Step 6: Situations should provide knowledge about the starting point of the actions where the needs of the users using the product are included but also the situations in...
Chapter
Persona descriptions and situations have now been prepared, and the next step, Step 7: Validation and acceptance from the organisation, is about how approval of the data, personas, and situations can happen in cooperation with the project organisation.
Chapter
The analysis has now been concluded, and a picture emerges of how many personas the project should have. But the final number has yet to be decided. Step 4: A number is established includes strategic decisions about who belongs to the user group. This also contains decision about what areas are that are to describe the various personas. As this ste...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper contributes with insights in a case study on the global emerging practices and challenges caused by the advent of agile software development and by suggesting how to improve practice. We report from a worldwide study of usability professionals, which shows that the usability professionals share a forced development and innovation in thei...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper contributes to the HCI literature on usability practice with insights about the empirical challenges and global emerging practices caused by the advent of agile software development (ASD). In the paper we report from a worldwide study involving 12 usability professionals from 12 different countries. The findings show that the usability p...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Including users in large participatory innovation projects together with professional innovators such as designers, people from marketing, engineers etc puts a strain on the user that might not like to be the focus of attention. With point of departure in two cases, one from business and a student project, the paper illustrates and discusses the us...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Including users in large participatory innovation projects together with professional innovators such as designers, people from marketing, engineers etc. puts a strain on the user that might not like to be the focus of attention. With point of departure in two cases, one from business and a student project, the paper illustrates and discusses the u...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper explores the persona-scenario method by investigating how the method can support project participants in generating shared understandings and design ideas. As persona-scenarios are stories we draw on narrative theory to define what a persona-scenario is and which narrative elements it should consist of. Based on an empirical study a key...
Conference Paper
This paper looks at four studies and the strategies the readers apply in the understanding of the personas descriptions. Findings show that persona descriptions are perceived locally and this might create problems when personas portray people from cultures distant to the reader. Cultures, that are geographically and socially distant.
Chapter
Full-text available
Personas are a method to communicate data about users and to aid in the perception of users. The method is supposed to create a shared perception of the users that is not built on preconceived ideas, but on field data. The paper presents an experiment where the same persona description was sent to 16 participants in 9 countries. The participants we...
Article
Full-text available
The personas method has recently gained popularity in the field of information systems development, but the literature about the method as well as empirical studies of its use in practice is still limited. In this paper we focus on the scenario part of the persona method from a conceptual and empirical point of view. Conceptually we examine how per...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Drawing on tenets from action research, this paper presents a yearlong intervention designed to facilitate knowledge of actual users and use in an Open Source Software (OSS) development community. Results from the interventions are presented and the influence of central characteristics of the OSS community and its communication is discussed. Initia...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper analyzes and discusses the ways tasks a re described and perceived in a remote Think Aloud (TA) usability te sts session. The paper includes reports from a study and the problems enco untered during a session of remote TA tests. The sessions were performed as synchronous tests, where the facilitator and observers received data and manage...
Chapter
Full-text available
Differences in cultural contexts constitute differences in cognition and research, which shows that different cultures may use different cognitive tools for perception and reasoning. The cultural embeddings are significant in relation to HCI, because the cultural context is also embedded in the methodological framework, the techniques and the tools...
Conference Paper
This paper develops a novel perspective on and a method for capturing and sharing knowledge across IT projects. The existing literature seems to contain two perspectives on how to achieve and share experiences between projects; a reflective perspective that focuses on individual project involvement and a formal perspective that prescribes written p...
Article
Full-text available
Differences in cultural contexts constitute differences in cognition, and research has shown that different cultures may use different cognitive tools for perception and reasoning. The cultural embeddings are significant in relation to HCI, because the cultural context is also embedded in the techniques and the tools that we apply. We lack a framew...
Article
Full-text available
The project on Personalisation of Self-service Solutions across On-line Platforms (POSS ON-LINE) focuses on users, clients, and self-service solutions. It is based on the understanding that clients and users are different and have different goals, and that self-service takes place in different contexts, on different platforms, and within different...
Article
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Copenhagen Business School is happy to host the 5th Danish Human Computer Interaction Research Symposium. The aim of the symposium is to stimulate interaction between researchers from academia and industry through oral presentations and a keynote presentation. We received 17 paper contributions for the symposium, of which 14 were presented orally i...
Article
In May 2000, AstraZeneca launched a Web service for asthma patients and health-care providers called LinkMedica, which includes an asthma diary for monitoring and self-management. In the diary, the patient enters his or her peak flow, number of doses of rescue medication, and if there have been any asthma symptoms during the previous 24 hours. The...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper documents the design process for an augmented children's play environment centred on that most ubiquitous and simple of objects, the cardboard box. The purpose of the exercise is to show how computer technology can be used in innovative ways ...
Article
Full-text available
In this theoretical paper we present a research proposal that focus on who we are as humans in the perspective of the designers of the technologies of the 21st century. In the global world of today, we need rich portraits of human beings in order to develop the mono-cultural and mono-dimensional models embedded in the techniques and methods used cu...

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