A Curated Personas and Design Guidelines Tool for Better Supporting Diverse End-users

Many work and living activities in modern society are increasingly dependent on web and app software. However, much existing software lacks consideration of many diverse end-user characteristics, such as age, mental and physical challenges, language proficiency, culture, socio-economic status, educational attainment and so on. Many developers do not have lived experience of most of these challenges, fail to empathise with those who have them, and lack knowledge of how to address them in their software design and evaluation activities. To address this issue, we designed a curated persona and design guidelines tool to help developers consider and address diverse end-user needs during the software development process. Our tool helps software development teams to take a more holistic view of human nature and diverse end-uses during the software development cycle and to design software with multiple diverse end-user needs in mind. Our evaluation with 23 real world software developers shows that the use of such human-centric persona and guideline tools in the early stages of software development can help to reduce software end-user bias and increase software accessibility.