The CAPTAIN personas travelled through the 22nd HCI International 2020 Conference

CAPTAIN project, represented by CAPTAIN LL Coordinator and AUTH Research Associate Despoina Petsani, participated in the 22nd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2020), which was held on 19-24 July, virtually, this year, due to the CoVid-19 pandemic.

CAPTAIN presented the work done by technical and pilot partners, in order to enhance the personas that created and used during the project, as the representation of CAPTAIN’s primary end-users. The CAPTAIN personas were used for empathizing with the community of older adult end-users in the five pilot sites of the project (Greece, Cyprus, the UK, Spain and Italy) and should be representative in order to ensure technology acceptance. The personas were initially introduced to older adults in the framework of a two-round design thinking sessions, constituting a baseline for end-users to elaborate more on their everyday living needs and requirements for the CAPTAIN eCoaching system. One step further, the personas were enhanced using real end-users’ data collected from the CAPTAIN stakeholders community. The personas approach and the outcomes of this methodology used have run throughout the entire journey of the CAPTAIN system design.

The research work presented, entitled “Creating a feedback loop between persona development and user research towards better technology acceptance”, received positive comments and great acceptance by the conference audience.