In a current project I am researching the context of use of social worker's cooperative attitude towards (cross-organisational) cooperation in the work field. I am met with quite a lot of resistance on this subject. Possibly because people may feel hesitant in acknowledging there is room for improvement regarding their own performance or work and may experience it as a personal assessment.
I thought it might be a good idea to shift from a 1st person, personal view towards a 3rd person view, using persona's.
I realise this is not the main use for persona's, so I was wondering if there are any experiences with similar or different approaches.
As an addendum:
Interestingly, in another project I've run into problems in my attempts to let the participants group (health enthusiasts) speak for the regular, 'ordinary health user' (non-enthusiast). They seemed to be 'stuck' in a (somewhat unrealistic) 3rd person view where a 1st person view would have been preferable.
In the case originally described above, the opposite seemed to be the case. Applying a 3rd person view yielded great results and some insightful breakthroughs. It seems using 1st and 3rd person views both have cons and pros.
The question remains though, is the (participatory) creation of personas (as opposed to the designer making them through user research) the best way to cater to this 3rd person view?
There is an recent article on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd perspective in design by Wina Smeenk (attached) which might give you some pointers on this issue.
I once read a paper about "extreme persona's" who borrowed from the method of Frens et al of extreme characters. I do not think these approaches are easily merged but extreme characters might give you an entry point to get a 3rd person perspective going.
Djajadiningrat, J.P., Gaver, W.W. & Frens, J.W. Interaction Relabelling and Extreme Characters: Methods for Exploring Aesthetic Interaction, in Proceedings of DIS 2000, Brooklyn, New York, 2000, ACM Press, 66-71)
Article A Systematic Analysis of Mixed Perspectives in Empathic Desi...
Jasper, I recently used personas to segment doctoral faculty based on scholarly career categories and levels of publications and presentations. When working with personas much of it depends on how the entity feels such customers should be categorized and the objective of customer experience engagement to be measured in this academy example. I recommend reading my study A Academy Customer Experience Benchmark Study.
Article An Academy Customer Experience Benchmark Observation
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