Persona mapping for usability of ICTD services

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been at the core of the 21st century human development efforts. The role of ICT for human development has been acknowledged and emphasized globally by entities such as the United Nations - through the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Consequently a lot of ICT based services have been developed, in particular within the context of ICT for Development (ICTD) to facilitate socio-economic development of marginalized communities. However, the information embedded in technology is useless if there are limitations in accessing this information. These limitations are typically and largely due to the poor and low usability of these services, hence the efforts to explore user experience (UX) with ICTs to ensure usability of products and services. This research is premised on the idea that increased usability of ICTD services would improve the effectiveness of these efforts for the benefit of the plethora of marginalized communities. To that end, this paper initially undertakes a persona profiling to determine the key characteristics of the user communities, clustered according to the key UX attributes. Subsequently the paper carries out a detailed usability evaluation, using System Usability Scale (SUS) to determine the usability of various UI components/techniques per identified persona.