Stakeholder-involved Persona Development for Large Scale Information Systems: A Danish e-Government portal case

Persona, one of the human centered design methodologies for information systems (IS), has been widely applied and tested in Europe and North America. Although the persona approach has attracted attention in Japan recent years, its creation process has not been properly articulated nor understood in the Japanese IS domain. In order to gain the maximum effect of introducing persona and contribute to the usage of systems with high social impact such as e-government applications, it is of critical importance to conduct appropriate persona development processes. In this article we introduce effective as well as pragmatic persona creation processes from a stakeholder involvement point of view, exemplified by a case of persona creation for a Danish e-Government portal site. The e-Government portal became widely known to be a successful e-Government case all over the world, which indirectly indicate the validity of the persona approach applied to the portal. The high acceptance of created personas among development team shows our persona methodology has high
potential to contribute to conduct similar large scale IS development projects with
socially high impacts, which are expected to increase in Japan.