Integrating stakeholders into the development of software is essential – being able to consult them at any time is illusory. Or is it? Fraunhofer IESE offers you a customized service that makes it possible to include the opinions of your stakeholders at any time.
The intended users of a software system can provide valuable insights into their wishes, expectations, and things they want to avoid at all costs. In practice, however, it is difficult to have the right representatives of the user groups available at the right time; for example, when a product owner has to decide on the priority of a feature, or when a user experience designer is designing the user experience. To ensure that the opinions of the stakeholders in your projects are duly taken into account nonetheless, we at Fraunhofer IESE provide you with an AI-based service. This service is tailored to your project plans and allows you to access the opinions of your stakeholders at any time.
Future users are usually the most important stakeholders in a development project. Their impulses and opinions can be decisive for the success of a product and should therefore have a significant influence on its design. In addition to users, there are many groups of stakeholder who are only indirectly affected by the system, but whose opinions nevertheless carry weight. Listening to all needs and opinions is crucial for the success of a product and its smooth implementation.
At the same time, suitable representatives are often difficult to reach – be it because they are far away or because involving them is challenging or expensive. In practice, stakeholders are therefore often not consulted frequently enough or not at the right time. This entails the risk of missing good ideas or critical feedback from stakeholders and thus developing the wrong thing. This can cause considerable additional costs and increase the risk of failure on the market.
As it is not always practical to “simply ask the users”, we provide you with the “IESE Virtual Personas” as an online service. These are based on a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is able to conduct conversations via chat using the underlying Large Language Model (LLM). These models can take on roles and characters (a persona) and are therefore predestined to act as representatives of a user or stakeholder group.
The persona methodology is a proven approach in user-centered development that allows representing typical user groups by fictitious characters. These personas are based on extensive research, data analyses, and interviews with real users. They help to better understand the needs, behaviors, and goals of users and integrate them into the development process.
Traditionally, personas are often represented by posters that summarize the most important characteristics and behaviors of the user groups. However, these posters are abbreviated representations of the insights gained and must be interpreted individually. On the one hand, this is prone to error, but on the other hand, the lack of interactivity also means that personas are not used or used only inadequately: Their use is often limited to their creators instead of being used by the entire team. As a result, their potential is not fully exploited.
Our AI-driven personas implement the classic persona methodology digitally and interactively. They enable you to talk to digital representatives of your stakeholders as if they were real people. These virtual personas offer all team members of a project access to valuable feedback independent of time and place. A requirements engineer can elicit background information on a requirement, and a designer can get inspiration and feedback on user interactions. Potential objections from project partners and conflicts of interest between design, business, and technology can also be identified and discussed in advance.
In order to be able to represent the opinions of stakeholders in a well-founded manner, the virtual personas draw on a huge amount of generally accessible information. We further improve the performance of the virtual personas by packaging and incorporating project-specific information and research results. As a result, the virtual personas act in a way that is individually tailored to your project teams and enable conversations that create real added value through inspiration and validation.
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE