Personas

Why use personas?

When designing software, it can be hard to keep track of the habits, needs, and concerns of the people who may use the product. Personas are a tool from user experience research for bringing these potential users alive to the product’s creation team, in order to craft a better experience for those people. A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product, based on user research.

These personas were created from interviews with thirteen potential users of the Psalms Layer by Layer tool, including artists, Bible translation consultants, mother tongue translators, and academics. For each person interviewed, we mapped out factors like their exegetical process, education, concerns, and challenges. We looked for trends to see where their characteristics and concerns overlapped, and found three significant groupings, which became the personas within this document.

Bible translation consultants outnumbered the other groups, which meant that we had less information about people in the other categories. One result of this was that we did not have enough data to create personas for artists or academics at this time. In the future, it may be helpful to conduct more interviews with them, as well as with a wider group of potential users like seminary instructors or pastors.

How to use the personas? Internalize them, use them to bring clarity to decisions, for a few meetings include persona discussion in the agenda, ask questions like,

• "How does this decision affect Sarah?"
• "Which design option best supports Moses [be specific]?"
• "Would Rinda be able to easily understand this wording?"

Sarah

Full persona: Sarah

Pragmatic Consultant

Role: Bible translation consultant

Location: Originally from the US, lives and works in the Himalayas

Organization: SIL

Experience: 7 years as a translation consultant, plus prior experience church planting

Education: Master of Divinity, M.A. in Applied Linguistics

English: native speaker

Hebrew: 4 semesters of formal Hebrew; skills have grown as she uses Hebrew for Bible translation

Goals

• help the translation team understand the Biblical text

• rendering Bible text in attractive ways

• community use of the translation

Workflow

Interpretive process

• uses academic commentaries and translation aids, and especially appreciates diagrams that highlight the most important features of a text

• has to be efficient about exegetical work to meet deadlines

• needs both cultural background and linguistic information about the text

Context for product use

• presents exegetical material to mother tongue translators, either by presenting it or by translating it into the regional language of wider communication

• Sarah has to explain literary form, poetic devices, how ideas are emphasized, genre, connections to other parts of Scripture

• refers to resources during the translation checking process

Concerns and challenges

• meeting deadlines

• lower translators' dependence on translations in languages of wider communication

Rinda

Full persona: Rinda

Moses

Full persona: Moses