An Approach to Generating Diverse Personas for Children and the Elderly for Software Development

Children and elderly users typically interact very differently with the same software interfaces. These should be taken into consideration while designing and developing software that will be used by these users. In order to better understand the characteristics of children and elderly users of software, we systematically reviewed the relevant literature. We identified different facets of children and the elderly that are relevant to their interaction with the software. The facets for children are- Special needs children, Interaction with technology and General characteristics. Facets for elderly users are- Technical proficiency, Interaction with technology, Technology expectations and General characteristics. We developed a tool with different descriptions of those facets collected from our review. We collected feedback on the tool from experts and refined the tool accordingly. The personas generated using the tool can be used as is or can be extended by adding more context-specific information to the personas. The tool will help designers and developers of software interfaces to better understand the requirements of these user groups and to incorporate their specific needs during design and development. This will result in reducing biases arising from age-related facets and help to create more inclusive software.