Southeastern Library Assessment Conference

Personas: An Assessment Tool for Library Space and Service Design

Session 1, Meeting Room IV

Personas are fictional characters that embody real users’ behaviors and aspirations and can be a highly effective tool in building a shared understanding of users across a library organization. They take the power of the personal story -- something almost everyone connects to and remembers – and use it to bring broad and common understanding of a community of users to a service organization. Although personas are most commonly used in web interface design, the presenters have used personas to package needs assessment data so that it can be used for designing library services and spaces. For this presentation, we will focus on our experience with personas as a way to share needs assessment data with relevant stakeholders in the planning for NC State University’s new James B. Hunt Jr. Library. Attendees will be introduced to the concept of user personas as an assessment tool, how to create them, and when/where and how to use them in space and service design in an academic library setting. We will also share freely available tools for creating personas, which are included in the IMLS-funded Learning Space Toolkit which was created, in part, by the NC State University Libraries.