Persona Design

A user-centered design technique in which designers create fictional but grounded profiles of representative users — demographics, goals, context, pain points — to guide design decisions when direct user involvement is limited. In accessibility and HCI co-design workshops, personas are often built from stakeholder interviews (clinicians, caregivers, advocates) when recruiting the target users themselves is impractical, and they are used to externalize tacit knowledge about user needs. Personas are valuable for aligning multi-disciplinary teams but risk flattening diverse lived experiences into archetypes, so they are best used alongside direct engagement with disabled users rather than as a substitute.